Duty of employer to supply information to union
Employment Relations Bill
10:30 am
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Employment Relations, Competition and Consumers), Department of Trade and Industry; Bradford South, Labour)
We must agree to differ on that point.
Clause 3 is not part of an underhand plot to allow unions to gain insider information about an employer. It applies only to the union's proposed bargaining unit and only once the union's application has passed the admissibility tests. Its purpose is to facilitate more constructive negotiations and more informed choices during the period of negotiations on the bargaining unit. The only information required will be the number of workers in the proposed bargaining unit, with the numbers broken down by category of worker and workplace. The union could not use that information to identify individual workers, and it is implausible that it could affect a company's trading position or endanger its security or that of its work force.
Hon. Members might be worried that the categories of workers might constitute sensitive information in certain circumstances. Indeed, I think that the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk raised the issue. However, we are not talking about such a detailed breakdown or about employers having to reveal how many, say, nuclear physicists or encryption experts they employ. For its application to be accepted by the CAC, the union must have given a satisfactory description of its proposed bargaining unit, and it will normally do so in terms of fairly broad occupational classifications. In virtually all cases, the employer's information will not need to go into greater detail. I should note that most employers already share such information with the union when negotiating on the bargaining unit. Our proposal will simply mean that information is shared more systematically and at the earliest appropriate point.
Amendment No. 20 applies to clause 5, which provides for union access from an earlier stage in the process than is currently the case. I hope to explain the clause in greater detail when we discuss amendments Nos. 18 and 19. The earlier union access envisaged will entail sending written material to workers' home addresses via an independent person. To facilitate the process, the CAC will need the employer's collaboration in supplying up-to-date lists of the workers in the proposed bargaining unit, together with their home addresses. That information will then be passed to the independent person who will, if asked to do so by the union, send to workers' home addresses any information with which it supplies him. Clause 5 does not give the union any right to have direct access to workers at their home addresses.