The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-11507, in the name of Angela Constance, on progressive workplace policies to boost productivity, growth and jobs.
14:46
When I published the working together review group’s report “Working Together Review: Progressive Workplace Policies in Scotland” on 13 August, I welcomed the group’s findings and said that the Government would
“fully consider the report and the recommendations, engaging business and trade unions directly”
before preparing
“a formal response.”—[Official Report, 13 August 2014; c 33379.]
Today provides an opportunity for all parties in the Parliament to contribute to that process and to our plans for a fair work convention.
When the First Minister announced the establishment of a fair work convention at the Scottish Trades Union Congress’s decent work, dignified lives conference, Grahame Smith, STUC general secretary, said:
“The STUC enthusiastically welcomes the First Minister’s announcement today. The establishment of a Scottish Fair Work Convention, a key recommendation of the Working Together Review, signals a new approach to fair pay and industrial relations in Scotland. The approach stands in stark contrast to the policies of the UK Government.”
I welcome that recognition that we are focused on what is best for Scotland. I have repeatedly stressed that this Government will work tirelessly to build a labour market and economy that are resilient, adaptable and responsive to change, because that is key to ensuring that Scotland’s businesses compete internationally and deliver long-term prosperity and high-quality jobs.
We need to support growth that reduces inequalities and helps everyone, particularly women and young people, to realise their potential. We need growth that reduces disparities between different parts of Scotland. We need growth that is sustainable and resilient.
The labour market statistics that were published yesterday demonstrate the impact of Scotland’s distinctive policy approach. Our economy continues to grow stronger, we are outperforming the United Kingdom on employment, underemployment and inactivity rates, and the gap between male and female employment has fallen to 5.4 per cent. I am pleased that there is also progress on youth employment, but of course far more needs to be done.
This Government is always focused on securing the best outcomes for Scotland. We believe—and the working together review confirmed—that progressive workplace policies can help to improve a firm’s productivity and innovation and can aid sustainable growth. Well-rewarded and sustained employment is the best route out of poverty and the best way to tackle inequality.
That is the context for today’s debate. Indeed, it was the context last week when the working together review was discussed at the business in the Parliament conference. It was living wage week, of course, and many businesses were keen to learn more about living wage accreditation. There was also strong interest in fair work and progressive policies that boost productivity, and there was an appetite to learn more about the specifics of what has worked in other businesses.
The focus on the living wage as one significant example of a progressive workplace policy understandably emerged because Rachel McEwen of SSE talked of the company’s experience of the living wage and what it had delivered for its business. It was heartening to hear her talk of the positive feedback from many SSE employees, not just from those who had seen a rise in their income. That is consistent with the view of KPMG’s UK head of facilities, Guy Stallard, who is on record as saying:
“Offering a Living Wage is good business sense”.
SSE’s living wage story is compelling. SSE has given the living wage to its contractors as well, and is at pains to point out that European Union procurement law is similar for both public bodies and energy companies. In the light of SSE’s progress, will the cabinet secretary undertake to look again at how she can offer the living wage to Government contractors?
Ms Marra makes an interesting point. We touched on procurement in last week’s debate on the living wage and at the business in the Parliament conference, and I heard SSE reflect on its experiences. The Government’s position, as articulated by the Deputy First Minister over many months, is that we must operate within the context of EU law. The stumbling block is the fact that our national minimum wage is set in statute and at a different rate from the living wage. We have had many debates about the limits of EU law, and the Government will always look to learn from the experiences of others.
I hope that Ms Marra can be reassured by the fact that this Government was the first—indeed, the only—Government to introduce the living wage for all its staff. We have taken a good step forward with the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 and we are in the process of introducing statutory guidance. There are also other schemes such as procurement pilot projects and the living wage accreditation scheme. We are not resting on our laurels but are always looking for ways to ensure that Scotland becomes a living wage country.
Rachel McEwen also captured the mood of the room when she recognised that different approaches will work for different businesses and that individual organisations are best placed to make their own choices, working with their employees and trade unions. That said, those choices are likely to deliver better outcomes for all if they are underpinned by a commitment to fair work and access to information about what has worked elsewhere. That resonates with the case studies that featured in the working together review and, indeed, other examples.
I recently met the owner of Get It Done Cleaning, which is the first cleaning company in Scotland to be accredited by the Living Wage Foundation. He spoke eloquently and made a compelling case for the benefits that paying the living wage had on his business and how it led to more motivated employees, which, in turn, resulted in an improvement in staff retention levels. He further spoke of how paying the living wage and having the accreditation became a unique selling point to customers and helped to set his business apart from those of competitors.
When I visited Inspiring Scotland this summer, I heard at first hand from some of its workers about the vital role that flexible and family-friendly working arrangements play in helping people to manage the twin responsibilities of work and caring. That was matched by the chief executive’s account of how much those employees contribute to the organisation and how everyone would lose out if the organisation were not able to offer that balance between work and family commitments.
Fair work is an important issue that impacts directly on business competitiveness and on the lives of individual workers across Scotland. There will be a fair work convention involving trade unions and employer representatives, and my discussions—with the STUC yesterday and with the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, the Scottish Council for Development and Industry and the Confederation of British Industry Scotland in the coming weeks—are about what the convention will do and how it will deliver.
The working together review group recommended that a fair employment framework should be developed through a new stakeholder body with representation from trade unions and employers; that the framework should be based on the what works principles, with clear responsibilities for unions, employers, employees and workers; and that it should seek to provide support for diversity in the workplace, with particular regard to women and young people. We must also think about removing barriers for other members of the community—whether they are from the black and ethnic minority community or are workers with a disability—to getting into work and making progress in work.
This Government also wishes to influence improvements in the national minimum wage. Earlier this week, the Deputy First Minister highlighted that a number of major charities, such as Engender, the Poverty Alliance, Children 1st and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, support our proposals for the Scottish Parliament to have control over that important policy area. The STUC is another important advocate for the devolution of workplace regulation. I am confident that the Smith commission will carefully consider the evidence presented by all those bodies.
Drawing on all those influences, the fair work convention should support diversity, equality and increased and sustainable economic growth by providing independent advice to the Scottish Government on matters relating to industrial relations, fair work, the national minimum wage and the living wage.
In discussions, I will seek views on the draft remit, which is:
“to develop, promote and sustain a fair employment framework for Scotland, including specifically:
finding and broadcasting evidence of effective industrial relations practice;
helping to improve dialogue between unions, employers, public bodies and Government; and
providing evidence-based recommendations on minimum wage rates and policies that help as many low-paid workers as possible and contribute to increased sustainable economic growth.”
I would very much welcome members’ views on that outline of a draft fair employment framework, whether during the debate or subsequently.
I would also welcome views on the STUC view that the remit should be explicit about the fair work convention’s role in, for example, exploring the potential to extend collective bargaining; promoting equality and environmental reps in Scotland’s workplaces; and developing a joint training programme for unions and management.
Those specific proposals featured in the working together report and could contribute substantively to the four strategic themes. As members will recall, the first theme is building industrial relations capacity and capability to boost productivity and grow jobs; the second is supporting fair work; the third is helping unions, employees and employers to work together in workplaces across Scotland; and the fourth is taking an evidence-based approach, learning from what works in Scottish workplaces and from best practice internationally.
I endorse workplace training and development, and employers and employees having a shared commitment to the growth of their organisations and communities.
I stress that I will listen closely to the views that emerge from the debate. I also make it clear that I will not compromise on the outcomes that we seek to deliver for the people of Scotland. Fair work helps individuals, families and communities; it helps companies to become more competitive; it boosts productivity; and it creates jobs. Well-rewarded and sustained employment is the best route out of poverty and the best way to tackle inequality.
I end with a quote from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” that features in the working together review group’s report. It is this:
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
I move,
That the Parliament welcomes the report of the Working Together Review Group; recognises that well-rewarded and sustained employment, progressive workplace policies and innovation provide the best route out of poverty and the best way to tackle inequality and boost productivity; supports the review group’s prioritisation of capacity building, dialogue, shared commitment and real opportunities for unions, employees and employers to work together, and endorses the decision to establish a fair work convention.
14:59
This debate about workplace policies to boost productivity, growth and jobs is much needed. We all agree that it is desirable for rewarding and lasting employment to be available to our entire workforce—that much is clear. I welcome the cross-party recognition that innovation plays a vital role in increasing productivity. However, it is apparent that forcing the advancement of unions’ reach and power is not the best means of facilitating sustainable employment and healthy workplace relations. That is why I oppose the member for Almond Valley’s motion and have lodged my amendment.
Before I explain my reasons for disagreeing with the motion, it will be useful for me to highlight the successes that the Government—I am talking about the UK Government—can facilitate when it comes to productivity, pay, jobs and growth. Figures that the Office for National Statistics released only yesterday show that productivity in the UK workforce is increasing and that growth in average pay is exceeding inflation.
Before Cameron Buchanan goes on to the ONS, will he comment on the statement by the Bank of England’s chief economist that the
“fall in real wages since their pre-recession peak … is unprecedented since at least the mid-1800s”?
Does he accept that, contrary to what he suggests, George Osborne has failed to protect the living standards of the people of Scotland?
I do not accept that because it is yesterday’s news and not exactly what we are talking about now.
Unemployment in the July-to-September period was down 115,000 on the previous quarter. Furthermore, employment in Scotland increased by 22,000 over the three months to September, which reduced the unemployment rate to 5.9 per cent. That is all occurring while the British economy grows at the fastest rate among developed countries. That is obviously all good news and, although there is further to go, I hope that members will join me in welcoming it.
The working together review group certainly aimed to answer some interesting questions, but its report has come up with the wrong answers. It recommends policies that are too interventionist and too expensive.
It is all very well to say that we support well-rewarded employment and effective communication, but practical considerations must be addressed. The report’s recommendation to require the presence of equality and environmental representatives in all public sector workplaces is at the least an unnecessary intrusion on workplaces. On top of that, the report suggests that all public sector bodies should be required to establish fit-for-purpose vehicles to engage formally with unions and should be required to include in their annual reports a section on their approach to industrial relations.
The intention may be good but, in my experience, extra layers of bureaucracy can severely hinder the effective delivery of an organisation’s objectives. Such time-consuming impositions can all too easily lead to the opposite effect from that intended, as resources are spent on administration rather than invested in skills and productivity, which can lead to increased pay.
Does Cameron Buchanan accept that international evidence shows that workplaces that have good, constructive and regular conversations with, and representation of, their trade unions have the highest productivity rates and better working conditions?
I am coming to that.
The report casually recommends the spending of substantial sums of public money. Paying for education for union representatives through colleges and leadership development programmes, as well as the provisions for equality and environmental representatives, would demand significant funding from the Scottish Government that perhaps goes beyond what is necessary. Unions are largely self-financed and it is not clear that the Government should redirect funds from elsewhere.
The report focuses on the public sector at the private sector’s expense. As the Scottish Chambers of Commerce pointed out, a lot of Scottish Government focus in recent years has been on the public sector, where it has greater control. The limited attention that the report of the working together review group gives to private sector employees is a concern, as three quarters of jobs are in the private sector and the Government could do more to help.
I agree completely with the Scottish Chambers of Commerce that the biggest issue that affects productivity in the private sector is the skills shortage. The Government would do well to aim policies at improving education to address that, as well as supporting business-to-business co-operation.
My views on workplace policies differ from those of the member for Almond Valley. I make it absolutely clear that I support the aim of facilitating constructive and more effective dialogue between unions, employees and employers. That is important for all involved, and experience has shown that working together can lead to outcomes that are in the best interests of employees, employers and the wider economy.
As the CBI has pointed out, the economic downturn highlighted the fact that flexible working practices and a more individualised model of employment relations enable employers and employees to work together to keep people in work. That helped to foster an environment of co-operative employment relations that was critical to the economic recovery. As the economy continues to grow, maintaining that positive relationship in the workplace is key.
A number of ideas could build on that atmosphere of co-operation, and it is clear to me that the most effective avenue would be to foster conditions that enable constructive dialogue between employers and employees without dictating how and when that dialogue should take place. The crucial point is that businesses and public organisations are best placed to decide on and implement the structure of workplace relations. Such flexibility is invaluable, and I feel the need to repeat that movements to exert Government interference would be a hindrance rather than a helpful development.
Accordingly, I urge my fellow members to vote against the member for Almond Valley’s motion, because the recommendations that it endorses would direct public money towards interventions that could hinder performance and which are not in the interests of employers or employees. To deliver healthy employee relations and a stronger, stable economy, we must only foster the conditions for effective communication and allow organisations to decide for themselves what best practice is. Productivity, growth and jobs would be boosted by that approach, and I urge members to support my amendment.
I move amendment S4M-11507.1, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:
“recognises that sustained employment and innovation provide the best route out of poverty and the best way to boost productivity; welcomes the substantial rise in the personal allowance and real-terms rise in the national minimum wage as well as recent increases in productivity and record employment figures under the current UK government, and considers that effective communication between unions, employees and employers should be welcomed.”
15:06
I thank the cabinet secretary and the Scottish Government for bringing this debate to the chamber. It is important because it centres on progressive workplace policies, which are important because they are about improving people’s working lives. All of us agree on how important the dignity of work is for our community. I congratulate the former minister Jim Mather and the STUC on producing the working together review and on the hours of work and consultation that they did on it.
Progressive workplace policies are crucial for many reasons. A central strand that runs through all the suggestions that are made in the report is—as the Government and the Conservatives have touched on—the key theme of productivity. Productivity is the cornerstone of a progressive workplace policy because it bookends the elements that make a workplace progressive, equal and sustainable. A progressive workplace policy comes from the need for more efficient and innovative production, and successful production is a result of such progressive policies. As Paul Krugman said in his book “The Age of Diminishing Expectations”,
“Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.”
The Scottish Government recognises that fact. It has set a target for Scotland to rank in the top quartile for productivity against our key trading partners in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by 2017, but at the moment Scotland is still ranked 17th out of 32 countries. Scotland’s relative position has remained broadly unchanged over the past four years, so a more innovative approach is clearly required. The report recognises that and is a good start towards that improvement.
Increasing the productivity of a business means that it can compete on high skill levels and wages in a race to the top, which creates the middle-income jobs that we need to tackle the cost-of-living crisis. The previous UK Labour Government made good progress on closing the productivity gap, but there is still a great deal left to do, and Scotland and the UK have roughly the same ranking in the OECD. The Labour Party whole-heartedly endorses that key aspect of the report and hopes that it will be carried forward by the Scottish Government. We commit to implementing the recommendations in the report if we are elected to government in Holyrood in 2016.
Some of the recommendations in the report cover equality.
For clarity, is that a commitment to implement all 30 recommendations in the report?
I can give Jenny Marra time back for that intervention.
Yes, it is. That is a commitment to implement the working together review.
Equality is crucial, as we still witness a pay gap. Despite the improvements that were reported on yesterday, it is still a challenge for women to get the skills, training and decent-waged jobs that they need. We have debated that many times in the chamber. The equality representatives recommendation in the report is a good step forward. The same applies to a fair employment framework. I was pleased that the cabinet secretary said that she will listen to all parties on that.
Recommendation 25 in the report would mean that more people with a trade union background sat on public boards and that female participation on those boards was increased. The cabinet secretary knows that that issue is close to my heart and is part of the Labour Party’s agenda, because public boards make many critical decisions about public spending and services but are largely unknown and are not entirely representative across our communities.
Many companies do not have trade union representation. What should happen to employees vis-à-vis board positions in those companies?
We would have to think long and hard about that. I am sure that the cabinet secretary will consider the matter.
Equality in the workplace has been discussed in the chamber in the past few weeks, from our request that public authorities direct at least one contract to a supported business to our request for the living wage to be a requirement in all public sector contracts. The Government rejected both requests for legislative action to improve equality. I am very interested to note how many of the 30 recommendations in the report the Government intends to enact.
The working together review highlights the incredible importance of unions in driving equality in the workplace. It says:
“unions are not simply representatives of a sectional interest, but can act as ‘swords of justice’ in the workplace and elsewhere, generating positive individual and social outcomes.”
The review suggests closer working between the Government and the unions, and a push for better communication, to improve equality through diversity and a mutually beneficial relationship.
As I have said, productivity is the central crux of the things that make a workplace successful and afford our workers and the public the most basic rights. All the recommendations can be enacted with political will or enacted immediately. The powers are vested in the Parliament and are in the Scottish Government’s hands. We can immediately begin to push matters forward.
For that reason, Labour is pleased to support the Government’s motion, but we look forward to hearing more detail during the debate on how the Scottish National Party intends to implement the suggestions in the report so that the potential of progressive workplaces comes to fruition.
We turn to the open debate. Speeches should be around six minutes. There is a bit of time in hand to compensate members for interventions if they wish to take them.
15:13
Back in 1977, I picked up a copy of “SNP & you: aims & policy of the Scottish National Party”. Page 12 of that document stated, in the section on “Manpower and Industrial Relations”:
“The SNP is strongly committed to the principle of direct employee participation in decision-making in industry and believes that greater democratisation in the workplace is long overdue.”
It also promoted the establishment of
“An Economic Council representing unions, employers and Government”
and established the SNP’s commitment to the minimum wage by stating:
“The SNP supports a statutory minimum earnings level.”
The final paragraph highlighted that
“A major increase in facilities for training and re-training is essential, together with a more effectively planned and co-ordinated training service”.
It took 30 years and the election of an SNP Government before staff who were covered by the public sector pay policy were paid the living wage. It was the first Government in the UK to do that.
Modern apprenticeships are at record levels, and plans are in place to increase their number further. Despite those advances, we are trying to improve the living standards of the people of Scotland with one hand tied behind our back. The problem is that employment legislation, which covers the minimum wage, the living wage and zero-hours contracts, is still reserved to Westminster. We are unable to introduce legislation here at Holyrood on the very issues that impact on the living standards of many Scots.
However, the working together review group report “Progressive Workplace Policies in Scotland” makes a number of recommendations that are in tune with those earlier SNP policies. The Scottish Government established the Mather review in February to examine how better working environments can be created for employees across the country. The report, published in August, contains 30 recommendations, including a key recommendation to establish a fair work convention. The First Minister announced at the STUC conference in October that an independent fair work convention would be established to develop, promote and sustain a fair employment framework for Scotland. The fair work convention will encourage dialogue among unions, employers, public sector bodies and Government in order to promote good industrial relations. It will also be tasked with influencing UK policy on the minimum wage and the promotion of the living wage.
The report was welcomed by the STUC, which recognised that it had
“the potential for extending collective bargaining and for democratising workplaces and industry.”
Also commenting on the review group’s report was Professor Ewart Keep of the centre on skills, knowledge and organisational performance, at the University of Oxford, who made a number of points in an article published on the future of the UK and Scotland website. One was:
“when it comes to employment relations/industrial relations policy, the issues in Scotland are being conceived of and debated in ways that are strongly dissimilar from England.”
Another was:
“It is not simply that the Coalition Government would neither be willing to commission nor act upon anything akin to the Working Together Review and its findings, but that some within the Labour Party at Westminster would also probably find the Review’s report slightly uncomfortable and unsettling reading. Its underlying assumptions about what the accepted ‘best practice’ model of industrial relations might look like are simply too radical and too strongly located within a Northern European social democratic and social partnership tradition to be liable to play well with the Neo-Liberal media and employer interests that politicians have become used to deferring to.”
Finally, he wrote:
“Scotland’s approach, at least as laid out in the Review’s report, argues otherwise, suggesting that for reasons of both equity and efficiency what happens in the workplace really matters to government and to wider society. As the Review points out, many of the Scottish Government’s long-term economic and social goals are unlikely to be achieved if productivity and economic performance do not improve, and the fruits of such gains are not more widely and equitably shared across the population. Better workplace industrial relations have an important role to play in delivering these objectives, and the Review sets out one model for how this might be achieved.”
The Scottish Parliament information centre briefing “Workplace policies to boost productivity, growth and jobs” highlighted that, based on gross domestic product per hour worked,
“Scotland has higher productivity rates than most other regions of the UK except London and the South East of England.”
The OECD compared the 32 developed countries on their relative efficiency using GDP per hour worked. Scotland was ranked 17th out of the 32 countries, with the UK in 19th place. The top three places went to Norway, Luxembourg and Ireland. If we are to emulate the small northern European countries that occupy the top three slots, we must increase productivity. That can happen only if the people who are expected to deliver that increased productivity feel that they will benefit from the increased sales and profits.
The Scottish Government’s submission to the Smith commission calls for powers over employment and employability to be devolved to this Parliament. With powers over employment law and the minimum wage, we could ensure that the people of Scotland receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. With those devolved powers, we could finally complete the journey we started with the publication of “SNP & you” back in 1977.
15:19
The argument for progressive workplace policies for decent, non-exploitative and well-paid work stands on its own. However, I want to begin by developing a couple of themes that emerged from yesterday’s debate on welfare and the experience of some of Scotland’s most vulnerable citizens.
In particular, I want to pick up on a point that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats put forward to defend their welfare reforms. Speakers from both parties pointed out that welfare spending in Scotland was not falling but increasing. Also, at a time of welfare cuts, unemployment is falling and employment is rising. That might strike most as counterintuitive, but the explanation behind it is interesting. Of course, pensions account for much of the increase, as the number of older people increases. However, more strikingly, in-work benefits—most noticeably, tax credits and housing benefit—are rising.
That leads directly to the second point, which follows a comment that was made by Murdo Fraser in a joint interview that we gave yesterday. He said that work is the best route out of poverty. On the face of it, I could not agree with him more, and I suspect that there will be hardly a soul on the Labour benches, and probably not on the SNP benches either, who disagrees with that sentiment. However, as a factual statement, it is not entirely true. Work does not automatically take people out of poverty. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others have pointed out, for the first time ever, the majority of households who are living in poverty have someone in that household who is holding down a job.
What is happening is that people are working, but they either are in part-time or temporary work or have such low-paid jobs that they cannot even afford to pay their rent. In fact, worse than that, people who have been in employment for some time but have had their wages frozen or their overtime cut are finding themselves slipping backwards and are becoming less well-off with every day’s work rather than becoming more prosperous.
Will the member give way?
Will the member give way?
Mr McArthur was first.
I was slightly quicker to my feet than Mr Hepburn.
I do not dispute the fact that the complexity of the issue does not lend itself to soundbites, but does Mr Macintosh accept that a rise of 40 per cent in real terms in the amount that is spent on housing benefit, over a period of 10 years of economic growth, is not necessarily a sign of success, nor something that is sustainable?
I agree with both the member’s points. The question that must be asked in relation to welfare reform is, do we really want to live in a country where someone can hold down a job yet not earn enough money to pay their rent? That is the very point that I was trying to make. That is not the best use of taxpayers’ money. Not only are taxpayers having to help families, but we are having to subsidise employers to maintain employment practices that we wish to end. That is the point that I am trying to get to. We are actually paying for things that we do not want to see in the workplace.
I agree with what Mr Macintosh has just said, but I want to take him back to what he said about the motion being somewhat inconsistent with what is happening. The motion recognises that
“well-rewarded and sustained employment”
is the best route out of poverty. The motion is not exactly inconsistent with the point that he is making.
I make that point gently, because I agree with what the member is saying.
I am not arguing against the motion. In fact, I think that we are voting for the motion, so I am not quite sure what Jamie Hepburn is getting at. Anyway, I take his point.
The point that I was trying to make, building on yesterday’s welfare debate, is that we are spending a lot of Government money supporting practices that are not only bad for people but are bad for the sort of sustainable employment practices that we want to have.
There are any number of reasons why we want to have progressive, fair and sustainable employment policies. The question of what we can do about that is where it all becomes slightly trickier. I do not doubt that many in the SNP have approached this issue in good faith. Alongside the very good work of our former parliamentary colleague, Jim Mather, in leading the working together review group, John Swinney was responsible for establishing the national performance framework. For those who are still unfamiliar with the NPF, it is akin to Oxfam's humankind index and other such indices that focus on measuring our wellbeing rather than other, less helpful determinants such as gross domestic product. For me, the NPF is an attempt, at least, to relate the decisions around Government spending more closely to outcomes, to the way in which we lead our lives and to the policies on tackling poverty, reducing inequality and improving employment practices that we support.
There are other initiatives, such as the STUC’s decent work campaign and the ethical finance round table, which is driven by the Islamic Finance Council and Tods Murray, to which the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth has offered exploratory support. I see many of those initiatives sitting alongside our debate today and as part of what I see as our model for building the model economy.
How do we translate those good intentions into actions? That is where I find the Scottish Government’s record to be at its weakest. The NPF has yet to be applied as a budget tool. In other words, it is difficult to see any specific budget decision that has been taken as a result of the NPF as opposed to traditional policy processes. For example, we had any number of opportunities under the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Bill to take stronger action on the living wage and on wage differentials.
There is a disjoint between a Government party that often talks about how strongly it opposes private finance initiative or public-private partnership projects and then invests billions of pounds—huge sums of public money—through the Scottish Futures Trust in exactly those sorts of schemes and, in some cases, in employing firms that are clearly suspected of being blacklisters, as Neil Findlay pointed out yesterday. Do ministers not recognise the contradiction between our all agreeing here today on tax transparency and on everyone—individuals and companies—paying their taxes and then giving tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to companies such as Amazon, which does not or will not pay its taxes and, worse, fails to recognise trade unions and uses zero-hours contracts?
Even on supply-side measures, none of us wants Scots to go into dead-end or low-skilled jobs, but the most striking feature of recent SNP budgets has been their targeting of Scotland’s colleges. Those are the very institutions that do most to build the skills that we need, to invest in people and to give people the confidence that they need to succeed, but they have suffered the largest cuts.
I will not end on that note. I have no doubt that there is a strong majority for progressive employment policies in the Scottish Parliament, particularly among the Labour and SNP members. Today’s debate is yet another step in the right direction. The fair work commission alongside the working together review are positive moves that will lead to recommendations and, I hope, to action. Any such moves will have Labour’s support.
15:27
I welcome the debate. The key word for me is “productivity”. I also welcome most of the working together review paper that was produced by the review group under the esteemed leadership of Jim Mather and the STUC.
I hope that members will forgive me if I seek to draw on my personal experience of running companies across eight countries in Europe, and my attendant education in workplace matters, and then, on returning to Scotland, my role as a company troubleshooter/doctor—call it what you will—assisting companies that were facing financial or managerial difficulties. From that experience, it became clear to me that to achieve growth—to grow and sustain employment, to optimise profitable growth and to secure greater returns for employees, owners and all stakeholders—the potential for conflict between capital, in the form of owners and shareholders and, in some cases, management, and labour, in the form of trade unions and/or non-unionised employees, which is still going on in some quarters in the UK, had to be eradicated or at least minimised.
My experience—primarily with work councils in Germany—was that bringing together capital and labour to work more closely required the greater participation of employees in the formulation of working practices; encouragement for employees to do some of the decision making; and their minor equity participation in the company of which they were a part. In Fife, in one company that I was involved in turning around, having got rid of the board, employees who had more than one year of employment with the company were allotted board shares. It was a minority shareholding but it was still shares and involvement in the company’s equity. There was no pension fund, but there has been capital growth in the shares and the company’s profitable revenues have grown three times—most of that since I left—over the past eight years, in which time the company has been under strong management by former employees. That capital growth should and will secure a pot of income for the employees when they retire and sell their shares back to the company.
Members might say, “That’s the private sector. What about the public sector?” There was once a proposal that in public sector organisations with a committed cost base, in the event of the cost coming in below that, part of the financial benefit should revert to the employees who, as I have said, should be participating in the decision making—in the public sector as well as in the private sector.
There is no greater evidence of that kind of participation than in the rapidly burgeoning social enterprise sector, which is now producing 5 per cent of Scotland’s GDP. There are many employee stakeholders in that sector, which gives an indication of how full participation in developing productivity benefits employees. That contribution can come about only through the further enlightenment of shareholders, management and employees—be they unionised or non-unionised—in the workplace. That is highlighted in the review group paper on developing capability in industrial relations. Communication and understanding are absolutely key to what, ostensibly, should be a capital and labour joint operation to promote success, just as the review paper requests that the STUC, Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish funding council should lead the charge on employees—whether union led or not—and middle management securing the learning to fulfil the ever-changing demands and economies of the workplace and the community and democracy within it.
I am grateful to the member for giving way. He said at the start of his speech that he agreed with most of the working together review. With which parts does he not agree?
I did not say that I disagreed with any of it. There are many companies in which, as I said in my question to Ms Marra, there is no trade union base. We have to encapsulate democracy in those organisations and encourage employee elections of representatives to—dare I call them this—works councils. The employee’s voice must be heard, which is also in the interest of the owners and shareholders, because that shared commitment boosts productivity, as I have indicated.
Thereby, employees all become stakeholders and partners in the enterprise, whether in the private or public sector, in relation to which I talked not about a revenue base but about a committed cost base. Participation in decisions, equity share and communication are pointers to a fairer, more equal and more constructive work environment.
The establishment of a fair work convention to promote equality, partnership and co-operation will be the foundation on which we can face the social and economic challenges and take the opportunities that the global economy—and our place in it—will throw up. It is not just about securing fair pay, although that is obviously key, but about embracing the financial and relationship dividends that will flow from the convention and from the provisions that I suggested earlier in my speech.
The success of any business demands recurring innovation, product renewal and diversification, capital investment, efficiency and strong marketing and selling, but at the end of the day all that must be underpinned by the ethos that having the high-wage, high-productivity economy that I believe we all want, married to sustainable growth in employment demand, necessitates fair, just and equal industrial relations borne out of good process and good communications.
Finally, the onus is on all employers and on management and employees in the private and public sector alike to make that communication and process an urgent priority. The working together review group has taken a good step forward. We now have to move very fast.
Thank you. I have given two members substantially over their time for interventions. I now have a little bit of time for interventions.
15:35
I, too, welcome the debate and I add my thanks to Jim Mather and the STUC for producing the report. It was good to see Jim back in the Scottish Parliament last week, no doubt sharing with those of us attending the business in the Parliament conference the latest gems from his most up-to-date reading list.
In his foreword to the report, Jim Mather speaks of the pressing need to reverse inequalities and
“expand the pervasiveness of constructive industrial relations ... to create gains for all”.
He argues that
“doing so will help us to face all future challenges with the confidence that our most important resources—our people—are being given every opportunity to realise their—and our—fullest potential.”
That is a point that Jenny Marra underlined in her remarks and I could not agree more. It is why the Liberal Democrats have put the pursuit of a stronger economy and a fairer society and creating opportunity for all at the centre of our policy perspectives.
I think that it is now generally agreed that the most consistently successful businesses and organisations here and across the world are characterised by progressive workplace practices—by the way in which employees are treated, valued, encouraged and indeed supported to take on responsibility. The cabinet secretary used the example of SSE—I was delighted to hear of its experience and I congratulate my good friend and former colleague Rachel McEwen, who I think was also right to point out that it is a case of horses for courses. Different approaches will work for different companies and different organisations. However, there is also much to be gained from sharing the good practice that is quite clearly out there.
As Cameron Buchanan’s amendment encourages us to do, we should perhaps see the debate in the light of yesterday’s continued good economic news—unemployment is down, employment is up and 2.6 million Scots are now in work. After all, the report was about progressive workplace policies to boost productivity, growth and jobs. It would be unfortunate were SNP members to claim credit for the upturn, having blamed everyone else for the downturn and condemned most of the measures that were taken to try to get our economy back on its feet after the 2008 crash.
Ken Macintosh gave a characteristically reasonable appraisal of welfare reform. The point that I was making in relation to housing benefit, for example, was that we saw a vast increase—40 per cent in real terms—in housing benefit during a period of Labour administration when we had uninterrupted economic growth. Therefore, it is something that is long overdue for challenge. That is not to deny some of the concerns that Ken Macintosh has about in-work poverty, which is clearly still evident.
It is right that we consider how we wish the emerging economic growth to be shaped. In that respect, the report is exceptionally helpful. The Lib Dems in coalition have done much to make the workplace fairer and the economy stronger. Our future is more certain as a result. We have listened to the Low Pay Commission recommendations and there has been a real-terms increase in the national minimum wage. The income tax threshold has been raised to £10,000, giving a tax cut to more than 2 million low and middle earners and lifting 220,000 people out of paying tax altogether.
I also welcomed the working together review’s focus on equality. The Royal Society of Edinburgh concluded in its report “Tapping all our Talents” that
“a doubling of women’s high-level skill contribution to the economy would be worth as much as £170 million per annum to Scotland’s national income.”
The number of women in work has risen to a historic high in recent times. There are 427,000 more women in employment and almost 100,000 more women in self-employment since May 2010, but clearly there is a great deal more that we can do, given the base that we were coming from. We have seen progress in terms of shared parental leave, which was a key demand of the “Tapping all our Talents” report, which again was front of mind at the science in the Parliament event yesterday. We have seen a new tax-free childcare scheme, which could benefit almost 160,000 Scottish families from next year. Those initiatives have helped and continue to help to build a more stable labour market and a larger labour force.
To build a resilient labour force, though, we need to focus unremittingly on skills. The review group makes some helpful observations in that respect. It talks about the need to
“ensure that unions are fully involved at strategic and operational level in the implementation”
of the excellent Wood report. I am sure that the cabinet secretary would whole-heartedly support that.
It is regrettable, however, that we have seen cuts to the college sector, which have borne down most heavily on women workers and on older workers, and a reduction in the number of part-time courses, which is inhibiting the efforts of many of those seeking to upskill and remain or get into the labour market. On gender equality, in the appointment of regional college boards the college sector has not punched anything like its weight.
There is a shared purpose here, though. We may disagree on certain aspects of the report or the conclusions that we draw from it. There even appears to be some disagreement within the Government ranks. That is much to be applauded. Maybe this is the new dawn that we are all being promised with the election of a new leader.
The report says that we can learn from the many high-performing countries and private and public organisations. We should continue to do that, to ensure that we pick up on evolving best practice and innovation. We need to work with the unions and representative organisations and across all sectors to find innovative solutions that can help us to address the challenges that we face. The report is a sound foundation for that continued effort. Again, I thank Jim Mather and the STUC for their contribution to the debate and to helping us, as we seek to achieve our collective objective of creating a stronger economy and a fairer society.
15:41
I am pleased to speak in this afternoon’s debate on “Working Together Review: Progressive Workplace Policies in Scotland”. I read the report the other day and I have looked at the 30 recommendations. Although I agree with them, I do not just glibly accept them. That would do the drafters of the report a disservice. We have to engage with the recommendations constructively, develop them and take them forward, or else they are just words for their own sake. They have to be implemented and be meaningful. Saying that we accept the recommendations does not mean that we can just roll them out and get on with it; that is not how these things work.
I pay tribute to Jim Mather and other review members. In Jim Mather’s powerful foreword to the report, he sums up the need for the review. He says:
“In recent years, I have thought deeply about the matters at the core of our remit and that has forced me to read widely and do my own research. Increasingly that meant that I was somewhat overdue in making my own contribution to the debate. So, I hope that this Report helps to rectify that omission in a most constructive way because it is better and more comprehensive than any solo effort could have been.”
Jim Mather made a huge contribution to public life. However, before he started the review, he felt that there was more that he could do as an individual but that he could not do it on his own—it had to be teamwork. That is precisely what the report gives us, as a broad range of skills from a broad range of sectors has contributed to the recommendations. That is vital.
I would like to look at some of the recommendations. Recommendation 11 is that
“A fair employment framework should be developed through a stakeholder body”—
a body that the review group rightly suggests should be set up. The recommendation focuses on women and young people. I understand why, and I support that. However, as I am the convener of the cross-party group on racial equality, members would expect me to ask, “What about black and minority ethnic workers?” Further, given welfare reform, members would expect me to ask about disabled workers in the workplace.
That is not to slight the specific challenges that face women and young people in the workplace. Nevertheless, we need a more rounded picture, and more information about how we can develop targets and outcomes for women and young people that do not make disabled and black and minority ethnic workers feel undervalued. It is about the mainstreaming of equalities within that approach. Although I draw attention to that point, I support the recommendation.
Likewise, on mainstreaming, recommendation 8 is that there should be a single minister—a single point of contact—in the Scottish Government in relation to industrial relations. Again, that is an excellent idea, but I have a little caveat on mainstreaming. Every minister and cabinet secretary has a front-line duty within their remit to ensure that they get things as right as they can, but an individual minister having a cross-cutting remit could be a very powerful device working in partnership across portfolios. However, such a post would have to be meaningful and have a direction.
I will give members an example of that from my experience. The cross-party group on racial equality in Scotland identified from data that apprenticeships via Skills Development Scotland were potentially not reaching people from the black and minority ethnic communities. When we communicated that to Scottish Enterprise and Skills Development Scotland, they sought to address the issue. However, it was our cross-party group that identified the issue for them. That shows that, even with the best will in the world, there are always omissions on issues such as apprenticeships, which are of course directly a workforce issue.
Staying with the issue of apprenticeships, I note that recommendation 1 refers to “union-led learning”. I am proud to say that the Scottish Government has signalled its intention to boost even further the current record level of apprenticeships. How we funnel that through businesses and companies in the private and public sectors in conjunction with our union partners and colleagues in order to identify workplace priorities for apprenticeships is vital. It is about how we bring meaning to that. I think that we could link the growth in apprenticeships to workplace-led learning with unions in the driving seat.
I intend this debate to be consensual, but I want to bring up a point that I have raised previously about Labour’s comments on apprenticeships. I do not mean this point to be party political; it is about developing the issue. However, when figures came out showing that a lot of people who were getting apprenticeships were already in jobs, the Labour Party jumped on that and said how terrible it was. However, I think that the Labour Party later acknowledged that it was just wrong about that, which was big of it. [Interruption.]
Well, I hope that the Labour Party identified that it was wrong and has learned the lessons, because the issue is skills progression whether someone is unemployed or in work. Apprenticeships should be available to all sectors in the workplace and should not be just for people who are unemployed. The unions have a key role to play in developing apprenticeships from within the workplace. I am happy to talk offline to my Labour colleagues who looked confused and explain to them why their view was wrong at the time.
Our intervention at the time was to prevent the Scottish Government from claiming that every apprenticeship was a job, which is what it was trying to do.
I will talk offline about that rather than waste the precious time that I have left to develop a serious point, but I think that Ken Macintosh is wrong about that.
Recommendation 23 says quite rightly:
“All public sector bodies should be required to include a section in their annual reports on their approach to industrial relations and its impact on workplace and workforce matters.”
Recommendation 24 talks about having worker representatives
“on the board of every public sector body.”
The words “local authorities” jumped into my mind in relation to that because of the huge reforms that they are going through and the huge amount of outsourcing that they quite often do with arm’s-length organisations and third sector organisations, which quite frankly is sometimes seen as a way of cutting back on pay and conditions for certain workers. I will not make any point on that other than to ask how we ensure that unions are actively involved at a senior level in local authorities when they are debating structural change.
Would you like to draw to a close, please?
We have to find a mechanism for unions to do that.
Finally, there was some positive analysis in the report of how the public sector has dealt with structural change. I was going to talk about the huge structural reforms that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has had to deal with, but do not worry, Presiding Officer, because I am not going to. The process was not perfect, but the board has been commended for the practical way in which it engaged with workforce representatives and trade unions to see through what could have been a tricky and painful reorganisation—
That is for another day.
—but which was a successful one that has benefited patients and the workforce.
15:49
I, too, rise to speak in favour of the motion. I welcome the report and the fair work convention that has been announced, but it is important that we see some timescales being put in place. Otherwise, the danger is that the report will be kicked into the long grass. Many meetings have taken place and there are recommendations in the report that the majority of members will agree with. We should move to implement them quickly, so it is important to have a timetable.
As a point of information, I think that I am on record as saying that I will come back to the Parliament at the beginning of next year with the Government’s final response to this very detailed report.
That is to be welcomed. I hope that, as part of that response, we will get a clear timetable for how the recommendations will be taken forward and put in place.
Looking at the current situation, I draw attention to a couple of issues. First, there is an increase in the use of agency workers right across Scotland. Unite the union and the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians have lobbied the Parliament to try to highlight that increase, particularly in the building sector.
A constituent approached me just a few days ago and told me his situation. He is a former miner who has been working for a number of different agencies. The tragedy is that the agencies tend to employ people, taking a cut, and then pay them off after a period of time. Last year, my constituent worked for Amazon. He worked up until Christmas on a contract and it was then extended for another month. Recently, he was paid off, and he went along to the agencies only to be told that he was on an Amazon list of people not to be employed this year.
That is not the way to treat any worker, and something needs to be done about it. The Government has put millions of pounds into Amazon, and when it puts millions of pounds into such companies it should be able to influence their employment practices.
I agree with what the member said about Amazon. Does he agree that submissions to the Smith commission should state that employment law should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament so that we can stop the practices that he mentioned?
I cannot comment on our party’s input to the Smith commission. Those discussions need to take place. What I can say is that I hope that all the parties are going into those discussions with an open mind. If that is a key issue that is coming up, our party should certainly have an open mind in looking at it.
Secondly, I want to talk about the living wage. The Poverty Alliance says that employers who pay the living wage have reported a 25 per cent fall in absenteeism. Some 80 per cent of those employers believe that payment of the living wage has enhanced the quality of their staff’s work, two thirds say that it has had a significant impact on recruitment and retention in their organisation and 70 per cent believe that it has increased consumer awareness of their organisation’s commitment to being an ethical employer. Those are all major benefits of paying the living wage that lead to better productivity. That is at the core of the report, as Jenny Marra said.
I lodged a question some months ago to ask the Government what discussions it had had with the care home sector about the implications of introducing the living wage. The response that I got was that there had not been detailed discussions. I highlight that because a constituent came to my surgery in Lochgelly just a few weeks ago and talked to me about his wife, who suffers from dementia and has a private company coming in and providing care. Over 10 months, 10 different carers had come in. If employers pay lower wages, people will try to find work elsewhere, so the point about the retention of workers is important in the care sector.
As we know, the introduction of the living wage would benefit 400,000 workers in Scotland, 29,000 of whom are in the care sector. As someone whose family has experienced the care that those workers provide, I often ask, “How much is a care worker worth?” I think that they are certainly worth more than the living wage. If the Government were to say that it could not do that, I think that my colleague Hugh Henry, who is not the chamber today, would simply point to Renfrewshire Council—
You must draw to a close, please.
When that council looked at the balance of—and the mismatch in—care, it introduced the living wage. If Renfrewshire Council can do that, I assume that the Scottish Government can do it, too.
The report is to be welcomed, but we need to make progress. I welcome the news that a timetable will be issued in January, and I look forward to seeing it.
Many thanks. I must ask for six-minute speeches, please.
15:55
Like many other people, I suppose, I am a member of a trade union. I have been a trade unionist all my life, first as a teacher and now as a member of the Musicians Union. Trade unions serve workers in very different kinds of bodies, and they play a great variety of roles in our lives. Unfortunately, many more trade unions today represent workers in the public sector, and there are far fewer trade unions in the private sector than there were in the past.
As organised bodies that represent important trades and professions, unions have to be involved in decision making in respective workplaces. The recommendation in the report that we are discussing—that a trade union portfolio be created in Government and that it be the focus of a Cabinet minister—bears scrutiny. My colleague Bob Doris said that all ministers are responsible for this matter, but it would be good to have that kind of focus so that we can not just deliver this aspect of social justice but extend more progressive approaches to employment such as worker ownership that are a step beyond what the report deals with.
Unions play a strong part in championing working people and work on issues such as gender equality, diversity representation and bettering working conditions. Why do we need that, particularly now? For a start, Oxfam has pointed out that the UK’s five richest families have more wealth than the poorest 20 per cent of the population. There is an obvious need, therefore, to find models in which workers get a fair share of the proceeds.
In fact, a look at the beneficial models that we have in Scotland—and which are mentioned in the working together review report—is long overdue. The report highlights the case study of Tullis Russell and Unite in Fife, which is a very good example not only of a situation where the unions are closely involved but of a worker-owned organisation that has been very successful. We should recognise that having employee-owned companies is a very good step; they not only solve the problem of company succession by eliminating the possibility of the founder or owner leaving, but keep business more localised.
In my constituency, Alness-based Aquascot began its transition to employee ownership in 2008 with the goal of completing the transition by 2016. This sort of thing does not happen overnight. The company’s owners decided to leave in 2016, and they wanted the workforce of more than 100 people to run what is an important producer of food in our area and indeed for supermarkets such as Waitrose. Aquascot is a community of professionals in the food sector who are dedicated to high-quality local production; in 2012, at the halfway point in the transition to employee ownership, the employees owned 42 per cent of the company’s share, and its turnover and staff numbers have risen.
When it comes to customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction, we know that the John Lewis Partnership—at the big end of the employee-ownership scale—is one of the best performers in Britain. We have to find out why that is so.
It is important that we recognise that trade unions have moved on a bit. I remember debates in the 1970s, when the STUC did not favour employee ownership at all. It is now much more open to new models.
We should look at the German model, in particular. In Germany, companies as large as Volkswagen have worker councils and worker directors, and labour relations and pay are much better. It is important that we integrate those things if we are to achieve the productivity that we all want to achieve. Scotland needs far more worker owners. The Aquascot concept can be taken a good deal further.
The Scottish Parliament, working in the interests of all Scots, must at an early stage seek to develop strongly progressive employment policies such as those that are discussed in the report. However, we need to go further, as I said. The trade unions and the Government, working together, are best placed to take things further.
We are being attacked from the neoliberal right and its individualised model of worker-manager relationships, which the member who moved the Tory amendment mentioned. That is the death of progressive wages and the death of the kind of atmosphere in the workplace that is essential to progressive employment.
We need to narrow the gap between pay at the top and pay at the bottom, following the model in the Nordic countries. In the developed world, the gap is widest in the Anglo-Saxon countries. There is a big lesson to be learned from the report.
16:01
I welcome the report and support its fundamental principles and assumptions, which I take to be: first, that increased productivity and better workforce relations are complementary; and secondly, that economic and social challenges are more likely to be addressed successfully in an environment in which unions play their full part.
There are good examples in the public sector and the private sector, and I hope to talk about at least one such example. I agree with the cabinet secretary that the draft framework should broadcast effective industrial relations practice. The more that we know about that, the better.
However, we all know about problems and bad practices. We have heard quite a lot about low pay—the UK leader of my party has today been talking about zero-hours contracts and other matters that are a serious problem for many people in Scotland and the UK. In some workplaces there is bullying and stress, which have to be tackled, and endemic in workplaces is a lack of employee voice and involvement.
Those are the challenges that must be addressed. The report goes a long way towards dealing with the problems. I was delighted to hear Jenny Marra, on Labour’s front bench, say that Labour is committed to implementing all the recommendations in the report. When the cabinet secretary sums up, it would be good if she could indicate whether the Scottish Government also intends to implement all the recommendations.
I hope that the report can be a focus for public debate about the state of industrial relations in Scotland and across the UK. When I read it, I was keen on the recommendation that there should be “a stakeholder body”, to “provide leadership” and develop a “fair employment framework”. I take it that that is what the convention will do—if I have misunderstood that, the cabinet secretary will no doubt correct me.
The framework should certainly seek to provide support for diversity in the workplace, particularly with regard to women and young people. Like Jenny Marra, I am keen on having “Equality and Environmental ... Reps” in public sector workplaces. It might have been Cameron Buchanan who asked, “What about the private sector?” The reality is that some of the recommendations in the report can more easily be implemented in the public sector, for which the Government has direct responsibility, but that is not to say that equality and environmental reps would not be desirable in the private sector, too.
Another recommendation is that the Scottish Government should
“legislate to ensure that there is effective worker representation (from representative trade unions) on the board of every public sector body”.
I support that, but that is already the case in the NHS and has been since the previous Administration. I speak as someone who had some involvement in that, and I am pleased that the extensive NHS partnership working that was developed under the previous Administration and then legislated for in the National Health Service Reform (Scotland) Act 2004 is praised so highly in the report. It is not known well enough that there is a Scottish partnership forum at the national level and other bodies dealing with specific matters at the local level.
There is a complex partnership arrangement in the NHS that started to be developed right at the start of the Scottish Parliament. Sections 4.29, 5.21 and 4.30 of the report refer to that in glowing terms, and recommendation 12 suggests that it should perhaps be translated into other sectors. We have a good example of such working in practice, and if Cameron Buchanan looked at that he might be a wee bit more positive about the potential of such partnership working.
Section 4.30 cites the example of the partnership information network, which goes way back to the early days of the Parliament and involves “unions and employers” working together to develop “model employment policies”. There is a whole series of those, and they include
“‘Embracing Equality, Diversity and Human Rights in NHS Scotland’; ‘Dealing with employee grievances in NHS Scotland’; ... and ‘Supporting work-life balance’.”
There is so much good practice there. In “Partnership in NHS Scotland 1999-2011”, Nicolas Bacon and Peter Samuel state:
“In our view, partnership in NHS Scotland has matured into probably the most ambitious and important contemporary innovation in British public sector industrial relations.”
It is a shame that more is not known about that. I declare a personal interest in my involvement in that work, but the current Government has developed it and can claim credit for the word “matured” in that quotation.
I think that I have a little bit of time left—
You have one minute.
I will finish by talking about the development of union-led learning through Scottish Union Learning and its development and learning funds. That work is important, and the report states that
“The STUC, SDS and SFC should agree an approach that ensures that union-led learning fulfils its full potential in addressing Scotland’s workplace and workforce development challenges.”
I do not have time to say everything that I wanted to say about that, but I note that a Scottish Union Learning and STUC report in 2011 highlighted the role of trade unions in ensuring effective skills utilisation. Among other conclusions, that report argued that effective skills utilisation has to
“allow workers a voice in the development of skills utilisation initiatives.”
It repeats the theme that, when employees and employers, workers and management, are involved collaboratively in working together, that has many benefits in terms of the development of the workforce and, crucially, increased productivity.
16:08
It is important that our society has industrial relations that ensure co-operation between employers and employees, and I very much welcome the work of the working together review. I place on record my thanks to those who were involved in that work, particularly the chair, our former colleague Jim Mather. All those who served in Parliament with Jim will testify to the energy that he brings to any task. It is clear that that has been the case with the working together review, and it is great to see him continuing to contribute to public life in Scotland.
I particularly welcome the term “working together”, which forms the review’s title. That sense of working together should typify the co-operative industrial relations that we should strive for. I believe that the Government has a good record in that regard and note that it has styled this as a debate about progressive workplace policies. However, I look forward to a time when we view the values that are expressed in the motion, which talks about
“capacity building, dialogue, shared commitment and real opportunities for unions, employees and employers to work together”,
not as progressive but merely as standard practice.
Rob Gibson was correct to identify other parts of Europe where that model is used far more than is the case in the United Kingdom. Germany, which is Europe’s biggest economy, meets that co-operative model far better than anyone else, and anyone who suggests that that approach, which sees better trade union recognition, stymies economic activity need only look to that example to see why they are wrong. That practice should not be viewed as progressive per se; rather, that practice, which is not the normal practice of other countries, is what we should aim for.
I mentioned the Scottish Government’s track record. Its employment policies are pretty good, as are its relations with its workforce. It has policies on no compulsory redundancies and paying the living wage for all its employees, which covers 180,000 people working for the Scottish Government, its agencies and the national health service. We know that the new wage rate will apply from next year—that has been set out in the budget.
We also know that the Scottish Government has good industrial relations with the unions. We saw that when the Fire Brigades Union in England and Wales went on strike due to the UK Administration’s attitude during discussions and dialogue about the union’s concerns about pension changes, while the FBU in Scotland did not go on strike due to the good dialogue that was taking place with the Scottish Government.
We also saw that when Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, instructed UK Government departments to review the provision of trade union check-off facilities—the arrangements by which trade union subscriptions are collected directly from salaries—John Swinney, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth, explicitly ruled out that approach. That position was welcomed by Lynn Henderson, the Public and Commercial Services Union’s Scottish secretary, who said that John Swinney
“by not following this lead has demonstrated to tens of thousands of PCS members and hundreds of thousands of trade union members throughout Scotland that the Scottish Government refuses to impose vindictive Tory ideology on organised workers and trade unions.”
Of course, unlike Westminster, the Scottish Government has not reduced trade union facility time.
The Scottish Government is acting in a manner in which I want to see all employers in Scotland act as a bare minimum.
We also have the Scottish Government’s work to promote the living wage elsewhere. It is funding the Poverty Alliance to deliver a living wage accreditation scheme to promote the living wage and increase the number of private companies across Scotland that pay it. However, I want us to go further. The expert working group on welfare suggested that the minimum wage should be raised to the level of the living wage. The Scottish Government is sympathetic to that outlook. We have now moved to a process of further devolution, so I hope that we see powers vested here in this Parliament and that the group’s recommendations will be looked at positively.
The Welfare Reform Committee and the Finance Committee are taking evidence on the matter. At yesterday’s Finance Committee, Professor Jim Gallagher, who advised Labour’s devolution commission, said that he was against the devolution of minimum wage powers. However, Professor David Bell told the Welfare Reform Committee that powers could be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. Given that Westminster has been poor at acting to ensure that the minimum wage keeps pace with the cost of living, we should be able to legislate in that area.
I welcome a number of the working together review group’s key report recommendations: a new body to provide leadership on industrial relations, including the sharing of best practice; union involvement in implementing the recommendations for the commission for developing Scotland’s young workforce; legislation to ensure worker representation on the board of every public sector body; and the inclusion by public sector bodies of a section in their annual report on their approach to industrial relations.
I look forward not only to the establishment of the fair work convention and looking at the recommendations, but to us moving towards becoming a fair work society.
16:14
I, too, thank those who took part in and produced the review, in particular, Jim Mather—someone we all know well. They have produced an important piece of work, which will enhance and improve the working environment for all involved.
In particular, the report highlights opportunities for innovation in the workplace; existing good practice; the opportunity to promote collective bargaining, which is very important; workplace democracy; and diversity and equality. Equality is an important aspect. It includes the participation of women, which a number of members have mentioned.
As a former shop steward, I welcome the fair work convention. It is an exciting proposal. I fully agree with the STUC and others that the Scottish Government and the STUC should review the memorandum of understanding and seek ways to improve engagement between unions, the Government and agencies. I include in that not only the public sector but the private sector, which is important in certain aspects.
Alex Rowley touched on that when he mentioned care homes. A number of care homes are privately run and are not bound by legislation, as publicly run care homes are. It is important that we include the private sector and the third sector. The third sector is sometimes forgotten about but it, too, employs an awful lot of people. Therefore, I would like the memorandum of understanding to include not only the public sector but the private and third sectors.
I will concentrate my remarks on the involvement of young people. A number of members, such as Malcolm Chisholm and Jamie Hepburn, have touched on that.
The involvement of young people in the working environment is important, as is getting unions into schools and colleges. I think that members have had contact with the youth committee of the STUC. Certainly, I have arranged to meet it in my constituency. It is working hard to push forward the youth agenda.
The reason that I have picked youth involvement is that, if we think back just a couple of weeks, we will remember how the referendum engaged young people in schools, colleges and universities—basically, everywhere that we went. We should expand on the interest that they showed in that and in politics. I do not mean party politics, just the fact that young people were so open to talk about what was going to happen in the referendum and the Parliament and how it would affect their lives. We should capture that openness while there is still massive interest.
I would like what the review suggests to be implemented. I will quote from some of its recommendations. Recommendation 1 is:
“The Scottish Government should continue to support the development of union-led learning through Scottish Union Learning … and its Development and Learning Funds and publicise the benefits of those. The Scottish Trades Union Congress … Skills Development Scotland … and the Scottish Funding Council”—
it is important that we not forget that those are working at the moment—should also be enhanced.
Recommendation 2 says:
“Training for union representatives (shop stewards; learning reps; health and safety reps) provided through further education colleges should be funded through a fee remission arrangement.”
Recommendation 5 says:
“The STUC/TUC Education in Scotland should work collaboratively with appropriate providers to develop a Union Leadership Development Programme to enhance the capacity of current and future union leaders.”
That is important. When I became a shop steward, it was simply because I was interested in what was happening on the shop floor and, whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, my peers elected me to be the shop steward. I did not get any training for it, so it is a great idea to introduce some form of training. I fully support that.
Those recommendations should be taken on board. I also suggest that young people’s knowledge of, and involvement in, trade unions would be greatly enhanced if the review’s recommendations could be included where appropriate in the curriculum for excellence. I know that that is not the responsibility of the Cabinet Secretary for Training, Youth and Women’s Employment, but perhaps she could raise it with the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. It would be interesting to young people in our schools.
I am sure that the member is aware that the STUC is undertaking a programme of visiting schools across Scotland and allowing senior pupils to engage with the values and work of the trade unions. Does she agree that that is an important programme?
I certainly do. The STUC has a teaching resource pack called “A Better Way to Work in Scotland”, which is being used in secondary schools. I think that the STUC’s programme is a great idea. We sometimes concentrate too much on the fact that young kids in schools have to get qualifications so that they can go out to work, but if they can understand how trade unions work and how they can enhance their workplace and their working life, that can only be for the good.
I think that the working together review is a great report and I look forward to its recommendations being taken on board.
16:20
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this afternoon’s debate on progressive workplace policies and how they are used to boost productivity, growth and jobs. I also welcome the publication of the working together review group’s report and the chance that the debate gives us to scrutinise, expand on and express our support for the recommendations in it.
For me, employment is a key part of who we are—our personal identity. Whenever we meet someone new, one of the first questions that we ask is often, “What do you do?” or “Where do you work?” With that in mind, it is important that we take pride in our work and who we work for. A large part of that is to do with how valued we feel by our employers.
That is why the issues that the report addresses are so crucial. If they are implemented properly, progressive workplace policies give people that sense of being valued and create in them a sense of pride in their work that cannot be bought. That sense of being valued leads to a happier and healthier workforce, a workforce that has less sickness absence and is more productive, and one that boosts growth for the company and the country.
That means that it is right that the Government should be taking a lead on issues such as tackling low pay, equal pay, zero-hours contracts, blacklisting and the living wage in public procurement. Blacklisting is still an issue while companies that have operated blacklists are awarded multimillion pound contracts from local government, the national health service and hubcos. The companies that have been involved in that practice have pushed people into poverty and despair and have wiped out a lifetime of working experience, all because the workers in question stood up for their fellow workers. Those companies have yet to issue an apology for how they operated and have yet to agree on any compensation. We should question why they continue to win public contracts when those issues are unresolved. I look forward to the publication of the Government’s guidance, which I hope will give public bodies more power and confidence in taking a stand against blacklisting when they procure goods and services.
A positive relationship between trade unions and employers is key to developing the right policies in a particular workplace and, as a number of members have said, it is important that we talk to young people who are entering or who are just about to enter employment about the importance of being a trade union member.
In recommendation 13, the report says:
“The Scottish Government, local authorities and the STUC should engage appropriately to expand the reach of the Determined To Succeed/Better Way To Work—Unions into Schools and Colleges initiative and should ensure that unions are fully involved at strategic and operational level in the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission on Developing Scotland’s Young Workforce.”
I was able to take part in one of those unions-into-schools sessions in my old school in Cumbernauld to give my perspective on why it is important to be a trade union member, and I would gladly take part in such an event again. Most of the pupils we spoke to did not have a sense of why they would join a union. Although many of them knew that their parents were members, they did not know what they got from being in a union. From the right-wing press, they had the idea that trade unions went on strike when they felt like it and caused unnecessary disruption.
They did not know about the rights that they had or would have at work—even the pupils who worked part time. They did not know that there is a minimum wage for 16 to 17-year-olds; that young workers are entitled to a 30-minute break if they work for more than four and a half hours; that young people have the right to time off to go to college or to do training; and that they have the right to time off to do exams.
They were quite surprised by the things that are in place to protect and support them—the policies that are in place because of trade union campaigns. When I asked them what they would do if they were in work and their boss asked them to work late when they had to go to school the next day, what they would do if their boss asked them to come in on the day before they had an exam, or what they would do if their boss asked them to work continuously for a six, seven or eight-hour shift, most of them said that they would probably have no option other than to do what their boss told them to do.
That is when the importance of joining a trade union became clear. That became clear when the pupils realised that they needed the strength of their fellow workers to ensure that they were confident enough to demand what they were entitled to.
That highlights that, when it comes to the progressive workplace policies that we all want, unless workers are aware of their own strength through membership of a trade union, all the progressive workforce policies in the world can be meaningless.
I hope in particular that the Government takes forward the working group’s recommendation on union learning in schools to continue the generations of pupils who leave school and become active in their trade unions.
16:26
The working together review, which we have been debating, is an important contribution to the wider debate about the kind of society that we want to build in Scotland. It compels us to consider what kind of Scotland we wish to see and to ask, in doing so, what kind of Scotland is possible both economically and socially.
That question is in part answered by the recommendations in the review, which signpost us to what better workplace conditions should look like through the promotion of practices such as collective bargaining, workplace democracy, respect for diversity and equality, and the participation of women on equal terms with men in the workforce. My colleague Sandra White made that point. I was pleased that five of the eight members of the review group, which was chaired by Jim Mather, were women. That sends out its own positive message.
One of the key themes of the review was developing capacity and capability in industrial relations. The use of the term “industrial relations” rather than “employment relations” is about more than semantics; it is about defining an employee-employer relationship that is soundly based on genuine dialogue and partnership working for the benefit of both employees and employers.
The background, of course, is that the UK’s record on industrial relations is not good. The UK has the lowest level of industrial democracy among 28 European Union countries; only Lithuania is worse. That is measured by the European participation index, which looks at board-level representation, collective bargaining participation and trade union membership.
One illustration of the lack of good industrial relations is the absence of a strong employee voice in our companies’ boardrooms. That stands in stark contrast to the experience in other countries, most notably Denmark and Germany. Rob Gibson spoke about Volkswagen as a model of good practice, of course.
Denying workers democratic power in the workplace has gone hand in hand with a deterioration in the quality of working life that has been experienced by people in the United Kingdom. The UK has the second-lowest pay among advanced economies, the third-longest working hours in Europe and a lack of job security among workers compared with that of workers in many other countries. Strengthening the democratic voice of employees and embedding that in the structures of companies can bring positive benefits, such as the improved productivity and innovation that the cabinet secretary spoke about earlier.
Gordon MacDonald spoke about democratic participation in the workplace. One way in which we can develop capacity and capability in industrial relations is by developing board-level representation for employees. That issue was highlighted in a report published by the Jimmy Reid Foundation entitled “Working Together: A vision for industrial democracy in a Common Weal economy”, which was co-authored by John Duffy, Gregor Gall and Jim Mather. It states:
“Board-Level ... Representation should begin at companies with 35 employees or more. All board representatives, employee and shareholder, should have equal rights and access to information.”
It suggests:
“One employee representative should be delegated by the recognised trade union, one should be ... from the Works Council”—
where that is appropriate—
“and the rest should be directly elected by all employees.”
The report goes on to advocate a co-operative rather than a coercive approach to fostering that form of industrial democracy. It states:
“We believe a model of this sort is beneficial for both employees and employers. However, we believe that a national consensus should be sought so implementation has the widest possible support from all sectors. We therefore propose a large, inclusive process ... to secure that support from both sides in industrial relations.”
I believe that that is the correct approach and one that we should support.
Mr Eadie clearly welcomes the recommendations of the working together review. However, following Chic Brodie’s remarks, I am slightly unclear whether the SNP supports the implementation of all 30 recommendations. Is that Mr Eadie’s understanding of the SNP’s position?
I do not speak for the Government, but there would be no point in commissioning such a piece of work and not taking seriously the recommendations. Therefore, I would expect the Government to take forward as many of the recommendations as is practicable.
On the subject of the review’s recommendations, I welcome those on union-led learning, training for union representatives and the development of equality and environmental representatives in public sector workplaces. I also welcome the recommendation on a union leadership development programme, which members have referred to and which would enhance the capacity of current and future union leaders.
The review group made a number of recommendations on ways of supporting fair employment. It is critical that there is a recognition of the legitimate role of trade unions in workplaces and in wider civil society. Malcolm Chisholm spoke of the extensive partnership working that has been developed in NHS Scotland. Alex Rowley spoke about the home care sector. At paragraph 4.3.3, the review group report refers to Unison’s ethical care charter, which I think is a positive way forward in that it commits authorities to buying home care services only from providers that pay the living wage.
Chic Brodie spoke about the need for good process and communication and Liam McArthur said that the most consistently successful economies and companies are those that adopt good progressive workplace policies. Jamie Hepburn, in what was an excellent speech, expressed his aspiration that the co-operative approach to industrial relations would in time be seen not as progressive but as the norm, as it already is in much of Europe. Jenny Marra spoke eloquently about the role of trade unions.
The report said that much of the issue turns on
“the quality of the union-management relationship”.
Although that statement may appear axiomatic, it is in contrast to relevant direct experience in Scotland at Grangemouth and at shipyards in Govan, Scotstoun and Fife. For me, that is why we need a co-operative form of industrial relations and why I fully support the review group and the work that it has done.
We move to the closing speeches.
16:33
The debate has been worth while. I start by striking a note of consensus, as it seems to be approved by all parties that we should thank Jim Mather for his work on the report. Having shadowed him for four years in the previous session of Parliament, I know that he is always worth listening to, whether or not one agrees with him. I do not agree with all the conclusions of the report, but the individuals who were pulled together to produce it are beyond reproach and of high calibre. They, too, ought to be thanked for their work.
One of the most interesting points about the debate has been that the Scottish Government still does not seem to have a position on the review. We are in the unusual situation of the Labour Party having a rock-solid and clear policy position while the Scottish National Party appears to be all at sea.
We heard almost nothing from the cabinet secretary about the Scottish Government’s response to the 30 recommendations. We heard some fairly rebellious statements from SNP back benchers—some went so far as to say that they agreed with only most of the report and one even dared to say that he does not speak for the Government when he speaks in a debate in the chamber.
For clarity, I said that I agree with most of the report, and I agree with all of it. I said that it could be extended to those who do not have union representation. As Jim Eadie said, there are companies with more than 35 employees where employees might not be trade union members. We do not want a division in society.
Presiding Officer, if you understand where Chic Brodie stands on the issue, you are a better man than I am. It is no wonder that he describes himself as a “company troubleshooter/doctor”—that is an exciting title if ever there was one.
It is important that, in the cabinet secretary’s closing speech, we hear where the Government stands on the issues, because people—including me—were a little sceptical about the review’s timing. It was set up in advance of the referendum, and we know that the review’s members were pressed quite firmly to ensure that the report came out in August, ahead of the referendum. In his foreword, Mr Mather said that it had to be done in a short timescale. The fact that the members were forced to report in a short timescale but almost nothing has been done with the report in the three months since it was published has made cynics such as me a little more sceptical about the report’s timing.
Will Mr Brown address the UK Government’s failed Carr report? The Mather commission and the Carr review were established around the same time last year. However, the Carr review made no recommendations because of the pejorative and ideological approach of the UK Government, which wanted to set up a review that was all about kicking trade unions.
I have to say that that is a typical intervention from the Scottish Government. The cabinet secretary completely ignores her report and any criticism of what her Government is responsible for and tries to deflect all the attention on to somebody and something else. When she winds up, she should focus on the Scottish Government’s report and what it intends to do with the responsibilities that it has.
My colleague Cameron Buchanan pointed out a number of responses to the review, but there are positive aspects to it as well. It is right that we learn from best practice, whether that is in a workplace, an organisation or the country as a whole. The report makes a helpful note of what NHS Scotland has done over the past 10 years. It is difficult to disagree with recommendation 1, which says that the Government ought to continue to support the Scottish union learning fund. When I visited Aegon earlier this year, I was quite impressed by what I saw and thought that a pretty good job was being done.
The idea of having one minister to take responsibility for the issue is perfectly sensible, although I would include the caveat that it ought to be an existing minister, rather than a fresh appointment that increases the size of either the Cabinet or the ministerial team. To include the issue in the existing portfolio makes perfect sense. The idea of reviewing the memorandum of understanding regularly seems fair enough, too, as does the idea of improving data quality so that all of us have a better idea of the issues that face workplaces across Scotland.
Cameron Buchanan touched on the areas on which we have some disagreement with the conclusions. He suggested that, in some parts, the proposals could seem to be bureaucratic, which might well be true. For example, I question the value of forcing every workplace in the public sector and beyond to have an environmental representative who would have to have time off for training and whose training would cost money. The suggestion that industrial relations ought to be part of the procurement process has been with us for months and months, throughout the passage of the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014. The Scottish Government adopted a clear position on the issue, and I assume that that is one idea that it does not intend to take forward.
We could get bureaucratic if we started legislating on board representation for trade union members, and the idea of setting up a policy group specifically to increase the number of board members who have a trade union background also strikes me as a bit bureaucratic. There are cost demands, as my colleague Cameron Buchanan pointed out, whether they be for setting up an environmental workplace fund, an industrial relations modernisation fund or an industrial relations learning academy. Who would pay for all this? What would the cost be of each proposal? Would they all add value and do what we want, which is increasing productivity? That is what everyone in the chamber thinks is the most important thing to do.
There are positive aspects to the review, but there are other areas where we disagree with what has been proposed—hence the amendment in Cameron Buchanan’s name.
16:40
Trade unions are a central part of Scotland’s economic, social and civic landscape. With approximately 700,000 members in Scotland in 2013, unions are Scotland’s largest civic movement, and we all know the vital role that they play in our communities.
As the review that we are debating states:
“By engaging at a national level, unions can positively influence wide-ranging social and environmental policies to encourage greater fairness and sustainability. Issues such as education, youth employment and climate change can be addressed in this manner.”
It is the Scottish Government’s role to maintain a clear dialogue with our trade unions to see the best results from such potential. That dialogue illustrates the essence of equality that must run through all progressive workplace policies if they are to be successful and sustainable.
Such constructive dialogue between our trade unions and the Scottish Government will also help to achieve some of the improvements that the working together review outlines in facilities, management of change, workplace learning and health and safety. By working together, employees, employers, unions and the Scottish Government can enrich civic society and drive the change towards progressive workplaces. As we have illustrated in the debate, with progressive workplaces comes a more equal society.
As Gavin Brown said, productivity is key to those workplaces, as is innovation. I was pleased to hear the departing First Minister touch on innovation in his opening speech for the business in Parliament conference, which took place last Friday in the chamber. The importance of innovation and productivity in our workplaces cannot be ignored. It is good for businesses, employees, employers and the job market.
I turn to some of the speeches that have been made in what has been an interesting and informed debate. I start with Liam McArthur, who highlighted how progressive workplace policies make for productive workplaces. He underlined better than any other speaker the importance of women’s work to the economy and the need to focus unremittingly on skills. He and I share that interest.
Liam McArthur was right to highlight the cuts to college budgets. We know that there are 140,000 fewer college places than there were when the Government came to power, but the skills and workplaces that we are talking about mean that colleges should be the powerhouses of the modern industrial economy. Liam McArthur is right to point to that important issue. As I have said to the cabinet secretary on many occasions, the college cuts have disproportionately affected women, older workers and part-time courses for people returning to the workplace. It would be foolish of us to talk about progressive workplace policies but not to talk about opportunities for the skills and training that underpin those progressive workplaces.
On equality, Liam McArthur was right to point out the Government’s recent appointments to college regional boards. I think that I am right in saying that 10 out of the 12 college chair appointments were men and just two were women. That indicates the Scottish Government’s commitment to gender equality. I hope that when we hear the response to the review in January we will hear more commitment.
Alex Rowley gave an interesting and good speech. He welcomed the fair work convention, as I did—every Labour member does. He suggested having timescales for the report’s recommendations, which was a good point. Some of the recommendations could be implemented fairly quickly. All 30 could be implemented now, as the power is in the Government’s hands. Angela Constance said that there will be a response at the start of next year. Alex Rowley was right to point out that he expects a timetable to be part of that response. I hope that the cabinet secretary can commit to that in her closing remarks.
Sandra White made an interesting speech. I always enjoy listening to her contributions in the chamber. She mentioned her own valuable experience of being elected as a shop steward—probably because of her innate passion and commitment to what was going on in the workplace and to her fellow workers—but having no specific training for the role. I see that at my surgeries, where trade union reps have told me that they feel that they need more training from their unions to represent their members properly. Sandra White was right to point out that training is key. Properly trained union representatives in our workplaces make life better for employees and employers and contribute to the success of our public services and businesses.
Malcolm Chisholm made an eloquent contribution, as always, in which he highlighted the issues of bullying in the workplace. I think that he was the only speaker to highlight that, but I hope and am sure that the cabinet secretary will reflect on that important issue as she develops the recommendations.
Malcolm Chisholm highlighted the work that the Labour Administration did when we were in government here on worker representation on NHS boards. In retrospect, it seems that that initiative is perhaps a bit overdue for being extended to other public sector bodies. That is recommendation 24. I certainly hope that, if the Government is not committing to all the recommendations, it will commit to that one.
That brings me to the point. How many of the 30 recommendations will the Scottish Government sign up to? Will we have to wait until January to hear about that? It would be useful if the cabinet secretary addressed the recommendations this afternoon.
The Government’s announcement of a fair work convention is welcome. However, I sound a note of caution: it cannot be just a talking shop. For all the warmth that the Government has shown the review today, it came up short when it was asked to vote for the living wage in public sector contracts and to use procurement to bolster supported businesses just two weeks ago.
Although the Christie commission report was lauded by the SNP, it is, by and large, getting dusty on the shelf. There has been no major reform to public service since it was published in 2011, when the SNP Government welcomed it. The SNP has not shown any focus of great intensity on the preventative agenda, which the Christie commission recommended and which, in the long term, would save money.
The test for the working together review and for the fair work convention, as for the Christie report, is how willing the Government is to drive policy, make change happen and legislate when that is necessary. Cosy consensus in the chamber is all very well, and the majority in the Parliament stand four square behind the review and the Government motion, but the proof, as always, will be in whether we can make the change happen in our communities and our workplaces. The will to drive that change is largely in the Scottish Government’s hands. Labour members are delighted to support the review, its recommendations and the Government motion.
16:49
I once again put on record my thanks to Jim Mather and each and every one of the members of the working together review commission. It had 50:50 representation between employers and trade unions, the employers on it were evenly split between the public and private sector and it even had 50:50 representation between men and women. That is certainly a marker for the way to go in the future.
Like Liam McArthur, I am always very impressed by Mr Mather’s reading list, although he will appreciate that, as a busy working mother, I enjoy listening to Mr Mather but rarely get the opportunity to read the books that he has the time to read.
This debate is an important part of the Scottish Government’s engagement process. It is important that members across the chamber get an opportunity to identify their own options and ideas and are able to shape and influence the Government’s response.
As requested by members, I will speak in a bit more detail about our response. It is important that we work together to build consensus. This afternoon has indeed mostly been constructive and consensual, although I have to say that I was somewhat stunned at the beginning of the debate by some of Mr Buchanan’s comments. I was also somewhat surprised that, at one point during proceedings, he fell asleep. A comment that I was particularly surprised by was that the Scottish Government is “forcing” the advancement of trade unionism. That, to me, sounded like a comment from a different era. I will leave Mr Buchanan with this quotation from Joseph Stiglitz:
“unions … are vilified, and in many states there are explicit attempts to undermine them, but there is no recognition of the important role that they can play in countervailing other special interests and in defending the basic social protections that are necessary if workers are to accept change and to adjust to the changing economic environment.”
The Government, like most MSPs in the chamber, is very much in favour of effective trade unionism and fair employment practice, not just because it is the right thing to do but because it is the smart thing to do for the sake of our economy.
It will not come as any surprise to Mr Buchanan that I will not be supporting the Tory amendment, because it fails to welcome the working together review. Also, crucially, it fails to endorse the establishment of a fair work convention. This Government’s view is that economic competitiveness goes hand in hand with social justice and that there is indeed a direct connection between well-rewarded and sustainable employment, productivity and innovation and economic growth.
It was Grahame Smith who described the working together review as one of the most important pieces of work that he had been involved in, and I concur with that, but it was Bob Doris who got to the heart of the matter—it is about social partnership. It is about the Government, employers and trade unions working together. It is not for the Government to be prescriptive about the model of social partnership at this stage, but it is imperative that we work together—the Government, trade unionists and employers large and small, from all sectors, to devise our own system of social partnership here in Scotland.
Surely there is a compelling case for collectively working together and in common cause to ensure that we get that quality and productive dialogue between the Government, employers and trade unions.
I say to Alex Rowley, Jenny Marra, Malcolm Chisholm and indeed Mr Brown that the Government will give its final response in January and of course we will be mapping out the way forward—they can call it a timetable if they wish.
There is no recommendation in the report that I am averse to and I welcome people’s recognition that we have made quick progress with the announcement that we will establish a fair work convention. We have to recognise that many of the requirements need further discussion with both employers and trade union colleagues. I will give one recommendation that it is not for me to give a view on. Whether there is a single minister in charge of industrial relations is entirely a matter for the new First Minister.
Jenny Marra and other members spoke about the importance of productivity in Scotland, which has increased from 94 per cent of UK levels in 2007 to 101 per cent in 2012. [Interruption.] There is progress—we are moving in the right direction.
One moment, cabinet secretary. There is far too much noise from members who are coming into the chamber. Please extend the cabinet secretary the courtesy of listening.
It is important to emphasise that productivity levels in Scotland are moving in the right direction and that we are making progress. Of course there is much more to do, and that is why the working together review and the fair work convention will help to make further improvements.
Rob Gibson and Malcolm Chisholm enlivened the debate with some pragmatic case examples from their constituencies and experiences. Malcolm Chisholm is right to highlight the importance and effectiveness of the NHS governance models, with employee representatives as directors on the board. The Government is certainly looking seriously at that, so that we can see how that good practice could be extended elsewhere.
Jim Eadie spoke about what kind of Scotland we want to be. Many members, Gordon MacDonald in particular, mentioned the Smith commission and the desire to have more powers for the Parliament. Although I will not speculate about the outcomes of the Smith commission—all parties are participating in that process productively and maturely—it is important to highlight the survey that was undertaken by the Poverty Alliance. In particular, 91.5 per cent of respondents felt that Scotland should have the power to set and enforce the national minimum wage.
I call on all parties—as the Deputy First Minister did earlier this week—to commit to supporting the very positive proposals that have come from the major charities and third sector organisations, to get in line with civic Scotland and to recognise the importance of this place having the power to make recommendations regarding the national minimum wage.
Ken Macintosh was right: the cost of living has rocketed, wages have stagnated and in-work poverty is very much the issue of today. It is simply not acceptable for folk to have to work for their poverty.
If I may encapsulate the aims of the fair work convention, they are to exert greater Scottish influence over the minimum wage; to champion good industrial relations, including payment of the living wage as the expectation, not the exception; to be a powerful advocate of the partnership approach that characterises industrial relations in Scotland at their best; and to highlight the fact that business productivity goes hand in hand with proper pay, with decent pay and with fair and equal pay.
My hope for the future is that the fair work convention, and indeed the Parliament, will most certainly not be talking shops but will be organisations with teeth and with the power to implement.
Mark Griffin spoke about how work is part of our identity. It is part of who and what we are. We must ensure that all our people are valued, rewarded and engaged in their work, and we must allow everyone to feel that they have a stake in the success of their workplace, their community and indeed their country. The Scottish Government is working to build that sort of economy and that sort of society.
After the energising process of the referendum, Scotland will never be the same—it will be a better place. We have the power to act, and when we as a Government have the power to act, we certainly do act to make a difference.
Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?
The cabinet secretary is in the final 30 seconds of her speech.
I hope that all members, as they have intimated today, will get behind the fair work convention and will ensure that it will make a difference to the working lives of people the length and breadth of Scotland.