My FT Letter: 'The FT must keep listening to employees'

Dear Editor,

I can’t remember a week when I have read so much of all of the FT’s stories and content, particularly enjoying your daily coverage of two of the biggest stories last week. These were: the publication of Labour’s draft employment rights bill on Thursday (‘Ministers fire starting gun on landmark worker rights reform’, October 10); and the evolving saga of what your headline writers delightfully characterised as the government’s ‘woolly investment summit’ (‘Executives hesitate over flying in..’, October 11). 

My only concern has been that when your editorial to close the week (‘Labour must keep listening to business’, October 11) considered these two areas together, business investment and worker rights, you seemed to regard them as being in conflict. It is as though all of the former is an unallayed ‘good’ and all of the latter a business cost, requiring a delicate ‘balancing act’ from the government. You write that these new rights and the ‘costs’ of adhering to them risk that they ‘undermine the priority of boosting UK growth and competitiveness’.

In reality there are good and bad investments and employment legislation. You reported DP World for example, (‘Blame game begins at DP World, October 12th) threatening to pull their £1bn investment in the London Gateway port at the description of  their P&O Ferries business by a government minister as a ‘rogue employer’. In fact, as you reported at the time in 2022 (‘P&O chief admits breaking law over mass sackings’, March 24 2022) , this would appear to be an accurate characterisation of this company, after their CEO admitted that the firm had deliberately breached existing employment legislation in failing to give their workers adequate notice of redundancy, even without the new proposal to ban such ‘fire and rehire’ practices in the government’s bill.

And as the excellent opinion piece from Oxford University Vice-Chancellor Irene Tracey highlights (‘How to get university spinouts out of the valley of death’, October 10), the type and direction of additional UK investment is key, with a particular need to address the shortage of Proof-of-concept funding in the UK, achievable as she points out, at a relatively low cost in public investment. 

But more fundamentally, there is considerable evidence, from my research organisation IES and many other sources, to support Angela Rayner’s contention in your Weekend edition (‘Our workers’ rights bill is good for business’, October 12) that businesses ‘are more likely to be blazing a trail when you have skilled, motivated workers who feel valued behind you’. Moreover, she writes, ‘the legislation will level the playing field, ensuring that good employers aren’t undercut by bad ones, so all businesses can compete on quality and innovation’ of the type that Irene Tracey argues we need to support far more of. 

Edward Cadbury, the founder of the famous confectioner, put it similarly a century earlier (‘Experiments in industrial organization’, 1912): ‘The supreme principle [in Industrial Organization] is the belief that business efficiency and the welfare of the employees are but different sides of the same coin’. That might have been a better analogy for your editors to use, rather than a balance between the conflicting forces of business investment and worker needs, when both are critical and mutually reinforcing drivers of national productivity and growth that we all want to see.

In the 2010’s too many businesses, as Rayner writes, like P&O, lost sight of that linkage and ‘joined the race to the bottom that saw them competing based on low pay, low standards and insecurity’. Rather than as your editorial argues, ‘to power a national recovery’ in productivity that Rayner describes, through  ‘finding money to invest in… training and skills’ (FT Editorial) and their wider workforce welfare, which will drive both ‘stronger growth, higher living standards and more investment and opportunities’ (Rayner).

Perhaps most of all though, your editorial board might do well to do as I did last week and follow your excellent columnist Isabel Berwick’s advice on Monday  (‘Invisible toil in the spotlight’, October 7) to visit the new exhibition she reviewed at London’s Welcome Collection, ‘Hard graft: Work, health and rights’. It covers the history and experience of the type of low paid, insecure, female-dominated work that Labour’s legislation is designed to protect.

As Isabel concludes: ‘on leaving the building, I reflected that… the reality of hard labour deserves, and receives here, honour and long overdue recognition’.

 And more protection from ‘rogue employers’.

Yours sincerely

Dr Duncan Brown

Principal Associate Institute for Employment Studies