Mr. Dave Anderson (Blaydon): The incomes policy does not affect only low-paid workers, but all public sector workers in this country. Effectively, public sector workers are under pay restraints at this moment in time and have been for at least two years.
Colin Burgon: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Yesterday, The Times reported that a large number of migrant workers are now employed in the care sector, which has massive repercussions for workers in that sector.
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Mr. Dave Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab): I, too, thank my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet (Colin Burgon) for securing this debate, but it is a shame that we have to have it. The issue should have been put to bed. Our Government and party have done fantastic work in the past 10 or 11 years, on the introduction of the minimum wage, as has been mentioned, as well as on the working time regulations, the extension of maternity pay, the right to paternity leave, sick pay and paid holiday entitlements, the right to trade union membership and the gangmasters legislation brought in by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North (Jim Sheridan). Clearly that raises issues, but the agenda has all been positive.
It is sad that we are here today talking about an agenda that, to me, is about going back to the future. It is about going back to the late '80s and early '90s, when, as a local trade union official in Newcastle upon Tyne, I was faced with the reality of telling care workers, hospital cleaners, school workers, school meals ladies and school cleaners, "I'm sorry; you have lost your contract. I'm sorry; your pay is going to be reduced. I'm sorry; you will no longer be seen as a member of the national health service. You will be working for Joe Bloggs' cleaning company." I thought that we had done away with those days, and put them behind us when we got rid of things like compulsory competitive tendering. I thought we had got away from those days, and what we went for in this country was value-led, not cost-driven, services. It would appear from the debate today that sadly that is not the case for far too many people.
In the mid-1990s, as a national official of Unison, I worked with people who, to use their language, rescued Filipino nurses from working in care homes. Those Filipino nurses were educated to degree level and were brought to this country under false pretences, being told that they would work as qualified nurses. They worked as basic grade care workers and were treated and paid in that manner; but, even worse, they were made to pay for accommodation. They were even made to pay for the lend of a bike to ride to work. They were made to pay a bond back home in the Philippines and they were made to pay a bond in this country. The term that we used then when we got those people out of that employment and into proper public service work was rescue. We should not be back in that situation today, talking about having to rescue people from exploitative employers. It is all so sad that the impact on today's labour market is not just on those workers. It is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet said, on other people in the work force. We have still not resolved the disgraceful situation by which seamen in this country are not paid the national minimum wage.
Also, many people are losing their jobs. One of my constituents, for example, is a man who spent most of his life working in shipbuilding on the River Tyne, earning about £12 an hour as a skilled engineer. Because of a lack of orders, including Government orders, shipbuilding hardly exists now on the River Tyne. My constituent, at 63, is now faced with the reality that he might have to work offshore to make a living wage, because, in his trade as a plumber, he cannot compete with the ridiculously low wages that have appeared in the North-East of England because migrant workers are being exploited by employers. That does not help him or the work force and it does not help our party or the Government.
The workers of this country are concerned about the issue, which is a core issue for Labour party members. It is about why we are here and what we represent. In the real change that has happened in our party and Government in the past few years to become business-friendly, have we forgotten we should also be worker-friendly? If we have, that is a disaster for us, and not only for the people who are the traditional workers, but the millions of new workers who do not understand the history of our party and do not have the relationship with it that they would have had if they had come here many years ago and integrated into the work force as people did over centuries.
I was sorry to hear in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet that the Secretary of State had said effectively that we are at the end of employment legislation in this Parliament. I hope that that is not true, because we need to put resources into making things like the vulnerable worker enforcement forum work. We need to take real action. If we need to legislate to make sure that those things work properly - and it sounds from what has been said today that we do - we should not be frightened to do it. We should do it for the right reasons.
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