What a joke the government’s promise to concentrate on ‘growth, growth, growth’ is becoming. Since the Prime Minister uttered those words on entering Downing Street, we have had road schemes cancelled and money withdrawn from a supercomputer project at Edinburgh university, that could have given Britain’s AI industry a leg-up. We have had fat pay rises for public sector workers without any requirement for them to adopt more efficient working practices. And we have businesses about to be lumbered with the requirement to offer employees flexible working hours from day one of their employment.
Now there is another productivity-destroying proposal on the table. Angela Rayner has drawn up plans for a ‘right to switch off’, that would stop employers from contacting their staff outside working hours. Businesses that dared to do so, it has been suggested, could be ordered to pay their staff thousands of pounds in compensation in employment tribunals.
No doubt there are bad employers who have no respect for their employees’ private lives. You don’t want your boss ringing up every five minutes while you are dipping your toes in the sea on a well-earned holiday. But legislation to prevent employers from contacting their staff out of hours when they really need to? It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envisage circumstances when Rayner’s proposal could become an onerous burden on businesses. What if an employee mislays a vital piece of equipment or withholds an important piece of information that is needed by others while they are away from the workplace? Under Rayner’s law, a business could be frightened to contact the missing employee for fear of financial retribution.
There are legitimate business reasons why you might need employees to sacrifice a day off because there has been an emergency. Say a business has been burgled, flooded, suffered a cyberattack, or some unforeseen event has placed sudden demand on a company’s services – say an earthquake or eruption of war abroad has led to an insurance company having to help thousands of tourists who have been left stranded or injured. Is Rayner really saying that companies should be wary about contacting employees in such circumstances and ask them if they might be available to return to work – in return for time off on another occasion? You wouldn’t want employees being recalled to work all the time, yet clearly there are circumstances when this might become necessary.
Labour seems to want to turn the entire economy into a macrocosm of the railways, where unions insist that if a manager so much as says ‘hello’ to an employee during a tea break, the employee is allowed to start the tea break from the beginning. It is this kind of pathetic game between unionised workforces and management that helped destroy nationalised industries like British Leyland. The government had the chance to negotiate an end to such practices in the railway industry by making them dependent on pay rises – but blew the chance.
Bizarrely, the Prime Minister seems to think that yet more layers of employment law will help boost productivity. According to a No. 10 spokesman, the right to switch off, together with the right to work from home, will mean happier, more applied workers who will produce more during their working time. But if having civil servants working from home really does boost their output, why hasn’t there been a surge in productivity since the pandemic? Instead, output per worker in the public services has fallen to its lowest level in three decades.
We are led by people who seem to have little idea of what makes societies richer. For years, Britain has been creating wealth thanks only to its private sector. Now, the government wants to disarm that too, by introducing the same lax working practices that have depressed productivity in the public sector.