Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2019
I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests. I commend the Scottish Government on its recent agreement with the three civil service unions. The agreement recognises the role of collective bargaining, and it offers a commitment to the living wage, to the principles of flexible working and to a diverse workforce; it also commits the Government to check-off and the protection of trade union facility time. That fair work agreement is welcome. However, the overall fair work action plan, which we are debating this afternoon, is, by comparison, timid; it lacks ambition and a sense of urgency.
Of course, I am sure that those working women and men on building sites across Scotland, all those industrious people working long hours in factories and offices the length and breadth of the country, and the workers—especially young workers—who are contracted on zero hours in shops and bars on every high street in the land will have rejoiced when they heard the news in the minister’s press release that, as a result of his action plan, “a new benchmarking tool” is now available, that a “refreshed ... Business Pledge” is to be adopted and that “a more tailored approach” is the new norm. I bet that those workers cannot wait for the real living wage to be rolled out to another 25,000 people over the next three years, which would still leave 450,000 working people on poverty pay in Scotland.
It was also claimed in the minister’s press release—these words are attributed to him, so I assume that they are the words that he spoke—that
“There are many employers already championing the dimensions of Fair Work.”
How many have signed up to the Scottish Government’s business pledge? When I checked last night, it was 601. There are more than 108,380 private sector employers in Scotland. In other words, only 0.55 per cent of Scotland’s employers have signed up to the Government’s business pledge. That is not a mark of success; it is a 99 per cent rate of failure.