Trade Unions

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for securing this debate. Despite working in business for some 50 years, I have never had a unionised workforce, but I have been supplied by, and dealt with, many of them. I can therefore appreciate how they have improved workers’ rights and secured fair pay for those they represent. Indeed, the Labour movement that they led has sired one of the great modern parties of government. It is true that in countries where unions are allowed to operate, wages are higher and workers’ rights are better protected. Nevertheless, in too many cases overly militant unions are damaging to society.

Unlike some noble Lords, I am old enough to remember the winter of discontent. Rubbish was piled to the shoulder in the West End, there was no petrol in the pumps and ambulances were grounded. Of course, this is the most extreme example of unions using their power for bad, but we can see examples of the same militancy today. Speaking as a Londoner, Tube strikes lose this great city up to £10 million a day. The TSSA, the RMT and Unite are not fulfilling their important duty to preserve workers’ freedoms so much as acting as pay lobbies to further raise the wages of their members, which are already far out of step with the restrained rises other workers have seen.

The majority of unions I remember in the 1980s and 1990s were led by sensible moderates, the sort of men and women who helped drag the Labour Party to the political centre and win three elections in a row. Now, they are led by a small elite of self-proclaimed communists, funding parties and activities such as TUSC, to which their members have not consented. Of course, unions have a place in providing a counterbalance to big business and, of course, they should serve as vehicles for progress in the labour market, but they should never be allowed to hold the public to ransom for wage rises way out of kilter with the public and private sectors.

The Trade Union Bill that is being steered through by the Business Secretary will go some way to addressing these problems; it will redirect unions to perform their historical functions, rather than seeing themselves as the Official Opposition.