The government has been warned about the impact of proposed workers’ rights legislation on the construction sector.
Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, told MPs that measures in the Employment Rights Bill to strengthen the requirement for collective redundancy consultations did not take into account the realities of the construction industry.
Under the bill, employers would be required to consult when proposing 20 or more redundancies across their entire business, regardless of the number of redundancies at each site.
Currently, employers are not obliged to consult collectively when they plan to dismiss fewer than 20 people at any one site, even if a larger number would be made redundant overall.
Reisner, who is also a member of the Construction Leadership Council, told the scrutiny committee taking evidence on the bill that the measure did not make sense when applied to the construction industry.
“We deliver on a geographical basis, and when a project comes to an end, understandably, there will be cases where redundancy is the only option,” he said.
“To enforce upon the whole business the requirement for consultation feels like it was not the intent of this policy.”
He said he had personally seen the impact on workers forced to go through multiple rounds of redundancy.
“It is miserable for the individual, and that is what I think we should seek to avoid,” he said.
Reisner also expressed reservations over the proposal to remove the two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims, replacing it with a day-one right for all employees.
“In construction, it takes a lot of time to get people ready to work,” he said.
“Coming down from two years to day-one feels like a big step for an industry that… may not even be aware that this is coming towards them.”
However, Reisner said there was “a lot of positivity” within the sector about some elements of the bill, particularly measures to tackle sexual harassment and improving equality.
“I think our members would say that this is stuff that they do as custom and practice already, so it is almost raising the level of the wider industry and trying to cut out poor behaviour among, not bad actors in industry, but those that are less developed,” he said.
The government is also proposing to merge the categories of worker and employee into a single ‘worker’ status to eliminate grey areas and protect against bogus self-employment.
Hannah Reed, coordinator of constitutional affairs at the Unite union, said she would want to see workplace protections extended to workers classified as self-employed.
“Unite represents a lot of self-employed workers in the construction industry who are not self-employed by choice, and they have fewer rights as a result,” she said.
“We would like workers who face a higher risk of injury in the workplace and who often lose out on pay and conditions, as well as freelancers and others, to have full employment rights.”
Labour MP Chris Murray said there was a perception that construction, and other sectors that relied on high levels of migration over the past 10-15 years, had seen a degradation in working standards through the spread of zero-hours contracts, wage undercutting, and fire and rehire.
But Reisner rejected that analysis, saying it was based on the perception that pay rates in the construction industry were lower than they really were.
“There is a characterisation that construction sought migrant labour as a way of undermining the cost of the existing workforce, but… that is just not true,” he said.
“A lot of people do not understand that we are a relatively high-paying industry.
“We used migrant labour where there was a lack of capacity in the industry, and it was almost a balancing item to meet that capacity; it was not about undermining costs.”
He said that regardless of action taken on employment rights, meeting future skills needs would continue to be a challenge – but he did not see migration as the answer.
“I think there is a long-term piece around us recruiting more effectively domestically,” he said.
