Unpaid Trial Work Periods (Prohibition) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 1:21 pm on 16 March 2018.

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Photo of Stewart McDonald Stewart McDonald Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Defence) 1:21, 16 March 2018

The hon. Gentleman anticipates where my speech is about to go, but to come back to the point made by Jeremy Quin, in the hospitality and retail sectors, where this practice is known to be widespread—it is by no means exclusive to those sectors, but it does happen in them rather a lot—there is a difference between a person applying for a job to be, for example, a barista in a coffee shop or a cocktail maker in a hotel bar, and their demonstrating that they can do the things that they have said they can do, which is fine, and a trial shift in which the applicant is asked to work alongside someone on a paid shift, doing the same job as them, but is not paid.

The Government think that the existing law is sufficient to deal with and prevent that kind of thing from happening but, as Mark Tami said, all too often a company advertises an unpaid trial shift, and in some cases it might be two or three hours, but in some of the more extreme cases, including the case that first brought this issue to my attention, it is 40 hours. Yesterday, the BBC interviewed someone who had done four weeks of unpaid trial work. Here is the deeply cynical element: in a lot of cases, there is not actually a job to give the person—it is about covering sickness, staff shortages, busy periods over Christmas or wedding seasons in hotels. That is where the law is insufficient to prevent gross exploitation.