Government blocks Bill to stop fire and rehire
The Government has been accused of using parliamentary procedure to prevent MPs voting on a Bill to stop employers using fire and rehire tactics, the Institute of Employment Rights reports.
Introducing the Employment and Trade Union Rights (Dismissal and Re-engagement) Bill to its Second Reading in the House of Commons, Labour’s Barry Gardiner reportedly said his Bill would not ban fire and rehire but would instead require businesses to meaningfully consult with their workers and worker representatives when such restructuring is required in order to strike a mutually agreeable deal where new terms and conditions could enable a business to stay afloat through a crisis.
According to IER, nearly one in ten (9%) of workers responding to a Britain Thinks survey said they had been threatened with fire and rehire in the last nine months and that 70% of the companies using such tactics are not in fact at the precipice of collapse but still profit-making. Indeed, household names such as Tesco, Sainsbury, Argos, British Airways and British Gas have all used fire and rehire tactics during the pandemic.
During his campaign for the Bill, Barry Gardiner is said to have met people who had been threatened with a £15,000 annual cut in pay, faced losing both their homes and their access to their children as a result, been pressured on their own doorsteps by employer representatives sent round to their houses with new contracts in hand, and a family who felt betrayed by an employer for which they had put in over 100 cumulative years’ of service.
Gardiner said victims of fire and rehire “are workers who have kept us all going through the pandemic … loyal workers who have served their companies for years, [but] this is not just a human cost, it’s an economic cost to the whole country as well”.
The IER reports that, during the debate, politicians from all sides of the house appeared to agree that fire and rehire tactics were morally wrong but Conservative MPs pushed back against the need for legislation, saying updated ACAS guidance to businesses should be enough to tackle the problem.
The Government then voted down a “closure motion”, which would have allowed the House to vote for or against the Bill, and proceeded to filibuster the Bill by talking until Parliament ran out of time.
Barry Gardiner said the Government’s behaviour was “cowardly”. He said:
“In politics, it’s rare to find something that absolutely everyone agrees on and yet all the way from Len McCluskey to the Prime Minister himself, everyone agrees fire and rehire is wrong. So why is the Government determined to block this Bill? Normal practice would be to allow the Bill to pass its second reading and go to committee, where it could be amended. If that proved impossible, the Government could kill it in committee or at third reading. So why is the Government intent on talking the Bill out this morning?
“The tactic of filibustering to talk the Bill out is cowardly. It seems the Government do not wish to be seen actually to vote against the Bill itself. They would rather pretend under the cloak of a closure motion that they want to go on talking about it so it simply runs out of time.”
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