Hansard

The low-pay and insecure job culture that we see at present is like a cancer in our society. It damages people. It eats away at their pride, relationships, morale, and health and wellbeing. It is not just bad for individuals; it is bad for society and our economy.

That is no accident. Over the past 30 or so years, the share of wages from gross domestic product for working people has reduced at the same time as massive concentrations of wealth have gone to the rich and the super-rich. That inequality is what is supposed to happen when the market is left unchallenged. In a recent lecture, Professor Prem Sikka of the University of Essex rejected the term “austerity”. He called it the organised humiliation of working people. It is characterised by underemployment, low pay and insecurity, with temporary and zero-hours contracts a key feature.

We see 414,000 of our fellow Scots living on less than the living wage of £7.85 an hour and 90,000 working on zero-hours contracts, many of whom are young people just setting out on their working lives. At the same time, eye-watering profits are being made by some of the world’s biggest and most wealthy companies, such as Google, Amazon, Starbucks and Apple. Those companies practise tax avoidance on an industrial scale, sucking vast sums of money out of the wage packets of the poor and the budgets of the services that we rely on.

That organised humiliation proves again that this is not a moral economy. It is not a just or remotely fair economic system; it is a thoroughly immoral, unjust and exploitative economic model. As politicians, either we can do something about it, take our responsibility seriously and act to challenge and change that system, or we can shrug our shoulders, blame someone else—anyone else—and look the other way.

Throughout our history, the organised labour movement has led with action on the big issues for people in the workplace. Holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, health and safety legislation, equal pay, trade union rights and the national minimum wage were all won, not because of the generosity of the rich and powerful but because working people campaigned for change with their industrial and political representatives, and that change was delivered. We need the same now.

The Scottish Government can no longer hide on some of those issues. Yes, of course, significant elements of welfare and the setting of the national minimum wage are reserved but, as we have seen with previous Administrations, change can occur if there is the political will.

At our low-pay summit yesterday, we heard Mark Macmillan, the leader of Renfrewshire Council, explain how his council addressed low pay in the social care sector. Now every one of the council’s care staff, whether they are employed directly or contracted, is paid the living wage. They all get travelling time and their uniforms are all supplied by their employer; the workers no longer have to pay for them.

If that Labour council can do it, there is no reason—no excuse whatsoever—for the Scottish Government not to do the same through negotiation and contract drafting across the public sector. That would give an increase of up to £2,500 a year to around 50,000 workers who are working on contracts that were issued by the public sector but who are being paid less than £7.85 an hour.

The Scottish Government must act. It can act and it can do better than ministers just rolling their eyes and pointing the finger at somebody else. Last year, the Government rejected our amendment to the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Bill that would have ensured that all those who are working on public contracts would be paid at least the living wage. It also rejected our amendment to prevent companies from hiring people on exploitative zero-hours contracts. How does that fit with the Government’s stated objective of making work fairer?

The reality is that if we are to see change, it will again come through the organised labour movement. Labour will redistribute through raising the top rate of tax and ending millionaires’ tax breaks. Labour will introduce a mansion tax and a bankers’ bonus tax and clamp down on tax avoidance; it will close off the loopholes that allow the exploitation of agency workers, which the Scottish Government actually uses when employing its own people. Labour will tackle zero-hours contracts and use procurement legislation and the tax system to see workers paid the living wage.

The Scottish Government can act on those issues. Unfortunately, it chooses not to.

I move amendment S4M-12678.3, to leave out from “recognises” to end and insert

“notes that the Scottish Government’s own statistics show that, under the last Labour administration, the number of people in in-work poverty fell by 30,000 and the number in absolute poverty fell by over half a million; recognises that, since 2006-07, the number of people in in-work poverty has increased by 50,000; notes that 414,000 people across Scotland would benefit from Scottish Labour’s plans to extend the payment of the living wage, incentivising more businesses to pay the living wage by using Make Work Pay contracts and increasing the national minimum wage to £8; believes that these actions, alongside the banning of exploitative zero-hours contracts, will improve the lives of working people across Scotland, and calls on the Scottish Government to amend the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 to extend the payment of the living wage to public sector contracts.”