Rights at work — Page 2

Paul Nowak
Cutting health and safety is just pure wrong

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Today – the day after Congress rejected the government’s pursuit of a ‘weakened health and safety regime’, Vince Cable has announced plans to get rid of 3,000 regulations and also scrap health and safety inspections for “Shops, offices, pubs and clubs.”

There is no detail on what these 3,000 regulations are, but it looks like it is simply those that were already identified by the “Red Tape Challenge”. Likewise the announcement on inspections seems no different from the announcement by Chris Grayling in March last year that he was instructing the HSE to do exactly that.

So, if this is just a statement repeating what has already been announced should we be worried?

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Posted on September 10th, 2012 by Paul Nowak filed under: Rights at work
Paul Nowak
TPA take a pop at union reps… again

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What are the big financial pressures and issues facing the public sector today? Is it the unprecedented programme of public sector cuts being driven through by the coalition government? Is it the hundreds of millions of pounds fuelling shareholder dividends rather than delivering quality public services? Is it perhaps the PFI chickens coming home to roost – with the tax-payer having to foot the bill for facilities they have already paid for many times over? Or maybe its the brewing storm that is likely break as Michael Gove’s charge to Academise and ‘free’ our schools results in more and more cases of corruption and financial abuse?

If you are the ‘Tax-Payer’s Alliance’ (sic) the answer is ‘none of the above’.

Instead the biggest problem facing Britain’s public services are in fact – you’ve guessed it – trade unions, and more particularly those pesky union reps who do all those tiresome and unimportant things like ensuring people get fair representation, equality proofing pay systems, making sure workplaces are safe and healthy, and helping their colleagues get access to new skills and qualifications.

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Posted on September 7th, 2012 by Paul Nowak filed under: Rights at work
Becky Wright
Supporting union executives: Lay Leadership Programme

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The Guardian recently put up an article profiling a group of upcoming Conservative MPs who are spearheading a range of proposals which are designed to ‘unchain Britain’. These ideas include a raft of changes to employment legislation which would make it easier to sack workers.

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Posted on August 23rd, 2012 by Becky Wright filed under: Rights at work, Union organising, Union reps
Owen Tudor
Global union-busters alert
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I never know whether this is ‘giving them the oxygen of publicity’, especially when the original article was such a naked ‘gun for hire’ piece of self-promotion, but the People Management blog by Freshfields lawyer Nick Squire raises some issues that need airing, and suggests something we need to be forewarned about.

The article bigs up the impact of OECD guideline complaints and Global Union Federation international framework agreements (IFAs) with multinational companies, and ‘warns’ employers that they need to beware such complaints and agreements. The article ends, tellingly, with a checklist of things employers should do, such as (these are Nick’s own words, honest):
- “appoint someone to keep tabs on global trade union activity and monitor the media for company mentions”… and …
- “set up an early warning system of labour issues across all countries, and make sure local managers know what to look out for”
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Posted on August 14th, 2012 by Owen Tudor filed under: Rights at work
Gavin Edwards
The value of trade union facility time

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Facility time is time off from an individual’s job, granted by the employer, to enable a trade union rep to carry out their trade union role. It is common practice in both the private and public sector, endorsed by law and statutory guidance and widely accepted by employers as a sensible way of facilitating engagement with workplace representatives. In short, trade union facility time has never been a controversial issue.

That was until the hard-right of the Tory Party and the Taxpayers Alliance decided this was an issue ripe for misrepresentation and mischief making. Why call it trade union facility time, when you can call it “taxpayer funding of trade unions”?

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Posted on June 28th, 2012 by Gavin Edwards filed under: Rights at work
Carl Roper
Attack on facility time is intended to have much wider consequences

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In his excellent book “Don’t Think of an Elephant”, US cognitive linguist George Lakoff describes the use by American conservatives of what he calls ‘strategic initiatives’. Lakoff defines a strategic initiative as a plan “in which a change in one carefully chosen issue area has automatic effects over many other issue areas”.

Lakoff provides two examples to illustrate his point. Firstly tax cuts. There aren’t many people who oppose all tax cuts. Most arguments tend to swirl around who gets them and how much is cut. The political right (on both sides of the Atlantic) usually argues for tax cuts on the basis that people should be allowed to keep more of the money that they earn so that they (rather than the government) can decide how to spend it.

However if you’re a political conservative and want to shrink the size of government and limit what it can do, cutting taxes also serves a much more fundamental purpose. It starves the government of the resources it needs to spend on a whole range of services and programmes. Hey presto! You’ve cuts taxes AND reduced the size of the government.

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Posted on May 29th, 2012 by Carl Roper filed under: Rights at work
Hugh Robertson
High heels: Lies, damned lies and politics

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It is always said that you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and while we might expect that of some tabloids, what about when it is politicians? Today the health and safety Minister, Chris Grayling is making a speech to the Policy Exchange where it’s reported he will say:

“It baffles me that at a time when we face a huge jobs challenge across Europe, that someone thinks it is sensible for the EU to be spending time legislating to ban high-heeled shoes in a hairdressers.”

Now the implication of this is that the EU is planning legislation on this. Well that is news to me, and it is news to the European Commission.

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Posted on April 18th, 2012 by Hugh Robertson filed under: Rights at work