Homeworkers

John Battle (Leeds West, Labour) | Hansard source

May I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East (Mr. Hamilton) for raising this debate again? I also pay tribute to the National Group on Homeworking, which for years has championed home workers and insisted that they should not leave our agenda. I congratulate my hon. Friend on his research. He dug up reports that were compiled some 100 years ago. I am reminded again of how much unfinished business there is in the House that we have to return to again and again. In his first manifesto, Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP, said that his main aims were to tackle unemployment, introduce a minimum wage and do something about housing conditions. Those issues are still on our agenda.

We have made some great progress in the last 10 years on the first two issues. We have introduced a minimum wage and we are working very hard to ensure that we have high levels of employment in Britain. Keir Hardie also warned that if we do not understand the relationship between trade and international solidarity, all our efforts will be doomed-and that was before the new world of economic globalisation.

Eighteen years ago, I raised the issue in the House of home workers in my own constituency, in Bramley. Those home workers were mainly women who worked wrapping Christmas cards in cellophane and threading the little strings on to gift cards. How did it work? A company in Bradford employed an agent on the estate, who took the packages around in a van, dropped them off in the house and told the women to have them finished by Friday. The women worked and worked to finish them, but more work was always piled on them than they could actually complete. Wage rates at the time worked out at less than 50p an hour-well below the average in the low-paid market. Then, as usual, the van failed to turn up on Friday with the money to pay the women and their families who had helped to meet the deadline, so the boxes were left stacked in their hallways and front rooms for ages as we tried to sort out the problem. It was a mess. Eventually, we managed, through the supply chain, to track down the employer and we had a real go at them, saying that they had to act responsibly towards those people.

It must be remembered that that was the age when people thought that home working was a good thing. We should distinguish between types of home worker. People who worked in an office might be told, "Please go home and work from your computer there-that will be much more relaxed." That was 10 years ago. Today, we read reports of people wanting to get back into the office and do hot desking because working at home is so stressful.

There are not only office workers. I like the expression that some of my hon. Friends have used: outreach workers. That refers to people who have work pushed out on to them, who are in a different position from those in the middle income brackets who are working at home on computers, because if they complain, they lose the work altogether and lose the vital income that is propping up their family budget. I was told, "Please, John, don't take the issue up with the company, because it might just cut off the supply line." It is true that the company in Bradford employed some of the people, but others lost their jobs altogether.

One million people in Britain are still doing home working. Some are packing Christmas cards and tags; some are knitting and sewing; some are doing inspections of industrial seals; and others are making souvenirs for sports shops. When I learned of that last one, I was tempted to wonder whether, in the supply chain of life, when we buy our products, we think about who in the chain is paying the highest price for those goods. Home workers are still right at the bottom of the pile.

I would like to add another dimension. In the search and struggle for what we now gloriously call joined-up government, which I believe is incredibly difficult, we must bridge across Departments. The global is now local, and the local is global. We are in an interdependent world writ large, particularly economically. In the past five years, people have thought that home working has gone offshore: it is done in China, India and the Philippines, where the footballs, football shirts and so on are made; it is not a British issue. Well, it is. Of course it is a two-thirds world issue, in the poor countries of the world, as a result of globalisation, but I say to the Minister that we need to tackle poverty worldwide as well.

I serve on the Select Committee on International Development, which is a great privilege. We all know of the millennium development goals. Which one is missing? We can work on health care, HIV/AIDS and education, but the issue that is missing is employment and wages. There is no MDG to ensure fuller employment or decent wages. That is a big lacuna in the international system. In Oxfam's 2004 report on home working entitled "Trading away our rights", for which it surveyed 12 countries, it demonstrated that if the poor are paying the highest price in one country and a campaign is started to do something about that, the company is shut down and people are out of work and the practice moves across the world to another country. We cannot do that; we have to join things up.

In this country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East said, a million workers are without proper remuneration or employment rights, which has something to do with the fudge of the definitions of an employee, a worker and the self-employed. He spelled that out eloquently, so I need not repeat it. Our employment law provides different levels of protection for those different categories. Those who are classified as employees have a range of employment rights, which we have been strengthening: protection against unfair dismissal, sick pay, some maternity rights and the right to redundancy pay. We are even encouraging people to take up resources to get child care so they have some space to work. However, all those rights fall away from a person who is not an employee and works from home. They fall down the gap between the different categories. We have never properly resolved that issue.

The present Government introduced the national minimum wage. That was not my personal responsibility, although I was in the Department of Trade and Industry when it was introduced. At that time, we were saying, "Well, we can't introduce it for home workers. That would be too complicated." Why? Because we had not sorted out their employment status. We cannot give them the wage if we have not clarified their status. That is unfinished business.

One part of the problem is that many different Government agencies deal with the issue. There are agencies that deal with legal definitions of employment-that involves the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. There are rights that relate to health and safety at work that are not covered there. Even rights relating to child care come through a different Department. I simply suggest that, even with all our best intentions for the legislation in this place, home workers are falling between the frameworks of different Departments. I am making a plea to my hon. Friend the Minister: the sub-committee that draws together different Ministers in different Departments should take this small issue seriously, put together a working party on it and crack it. It should drive through a means of joining up the agendas.

I would like international and national law to be brought together with good practice. There is a home workers code. That has something to do with the whole business of checking sourcing. If we could regularise legislation and sort out where home workers fit in the piece so that they have protection, that would be a start.

In 2004, a report entitled "Made at Home" was published by, interestingly, the TUC, the National Group on Homeworking and Oxfam. At the ground floor level, people are joining together the agendas: the TUC for workers' rights, Oxfam, which works internationally as well in Britain, and the NGH. That group could be a means of demonstrating how such joining up can be done. The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, said at the time:

"The main problem is that homeworkers are often isolated, without the support of workmates or a union to speak up for them. Many are not 'employees' and so lack even the most basic employment rights including protection against unfair dismissal and maternity leave. Legally all homeworkers should be getting the minimum wage and holiday pay, but the reality is that many employers prey upon and exploit their vulnerable position for their own ends.

The situation is made worse because the law covering homeworkers is unclear. If they complain, it's likely that their supply of work will stop without notice, so many homeworkers stay silent and abuses go unreported. Homeworkers should get the same employment rights as all other employees-their status as third class workers cannot be allowed to continue."

I absolutely agree. That is why it is unfinished business.

If that is the legal framework, we need to do more. How should I put this? It is in the light of the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) about the company referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, North-East. We need to do much more as a society-by which I mean civil society, campaigning organisations, Members of Parliament and Departments-in tracking where company profits come from. We are not doing enough to track the sourcing. Who pays the highest price? I have been quite shocked. In the International Development Committee we have been considering the ethical trading initiative, but if people go through the reports, they will find that the companies in Britain that are signed up to the ETI are the very companies that, through the chain of supply, are employing home workers and hoping that no one notices. We need to track them and say, "You can't sign up to ethical trading initiatives and claim the moral high ground when at the same time, four layers down, you are exploiting workers in the most atrocious way because you are exploiting gaps in the law." Tracking supply chains is a job that still needs to be done.

We need to regularise and fuse together at national level legal protections such as the minimum wage, employment law and those relating to health and safety and child care. We need to track supply chains and to push for more international action with regard to the work of the International Labour Organisation to get the standards in place so that we are not simply saying, "Well, if you're a home worker here and your job has moved elsewhere in the world, those workers will be exploited." What are we doing about building this issue into the framework of the World Trade Organisation, for example, and fusing the ILO and WTO together to ensure that workers do not continue to be exploited anywhere?

My view in this saga of unfinished business is that, at the end of the day, as usual, it is the most vulnerable, the poorest, who subsidise the economy, the growth and the profits and prop up the rich and the better-off. Furthermore, the poor always pay the highest price, whether that relates to energy costs, borrowing money from loan sharks, or indeed doing the work at basic level. We owe them the responsibility of saying that they should not pay the highest personal and family price. We should take legislative and practical action as a society, locally, nationally and internationally, to ensure that they get the same employment rights and protection as everyone else. That is part of the campaign to make poverty history and the campaign for fairer trade; but it is also part of the campaign for treating human beings decently. Sadly, after 100 years, we still have quite a way to go.