Extracts from Westminster Hall debate on The Future of Work - Nov 19

I am sure that everyone in this room would agree that whatever the future of work looks like, trade unionism must be at the heart of it if we are to see well-paid, highly skilled and secure jobs not just for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children. I have been a member of a trade union, and indeed of the Labour party, since I was 16, so an awfully long time now. In fact, I think it is since I was 15—I may have lied about my age.

It would be remiss of me, as chair of Unite the union’s parliamentary group—[Interruption.] Thank you, comrades. It would be remiss of me not to refer to the strike action that Unite members are being forced to take at the Barnoldswick factory, birthplace of the jet engine, where Rolls-Royce is cutting 350 highly skilled jobs and moving the work offshore. It is fair to say that workers at Barnoldswick are cutting-edge, world-beating—quite simply, the best in the business. Those are surely exactly the sorts of jobs that we need to keep, create and encourage, yet Rolls-Royce—sadly, the Government seem to be standing idly by—is sending them abroad, to Singapore, and ironically to a factory that the Barnoldswick workforce helped to set up. They had been given promises that doing so would never put the home site at risk, but that has turned out to be a gross betrayal of loyal staff by Rolls-Royce management.

It is no wonder that Rolls-Royce workers are striking to save the jobs. They are doing so not just for themselves and their families, but for future generations and for their community. The strike, which was completely avoidable, is now set to continue until Christmas eve and quite possibly beyond that. It is not a pleasant experience to be on the picket line at this time of year, when it is cold and dark, but their cause is just.

The workers will not back down, and neither will their union. The jobs are simply too valuable, not just for the workers and their community but for the whole economy. It is a battle—the battle for Barnoldswick—and they must not lose it, because let us be clear that once the jobs go, they will be gone for good. It is an open secret that these 350 redundancies, on top of the 500 that have already taken place over the last two years, would almost certainly spell the end of that historic site. With only about 150 workers left, the site will simply become unviable. It is not overstating the case to say that that would be nothing less than ripping the heart out of the community. It would be an appalling legacy for the iconic Rolls-Royce brand.

The Government should not be sitting on their hands. People should bear it in mind that Rolls-Royce is doing all that while benefiting from billions of pounds of taxpayer support—support that is meant to be keeping jobs in industry going during the pandemic. It gets worse, because specifically the company is set to receive another £50 million of Government funding for producing a new component for the world-beating UltraFan engine, Rolls-Royce’s next generation of green jet engines. But that must be completed by Christmas for the company to get the money. I am told that Rolls-Royce is currently lobbying the Government to give it an extension to that deadline, and Rolls-Royce is blaming covid for the delay, but that simply is not the case; it is the strike that is preventing Rolls-Royce from meeting the deadline. The workers of Barnoldswick assure me that if the dispute were resolved tomorrow or even today, they could produce that part by Christmas, and only the Barnoldswick workers can make the component, so let us be absolutely clear about that. No other factory and no other workforce in the world have the skills to do that, because if it were possible elsewhere, believe me, we can be absolutely certain that Rolls-Royce would be sending that work there. It is ultra-high-end engineering, and it needs the world-beating engineers at Barnoldswick to deliver the goods.

The Government have a very easy way to end this dispute. The have the power to end it tomorrow if they want to. They can simply refuse to extend the deadline for Rolls-Royce which would mean that it had to get back to the negotiations, take the job cuts off the table and commit to a viable future for Barnoldswick.

In my capacity of the chair of the Unite the union parliamentary group, I have written to the Rolls-Royce chief executive, Mr Warren East, asking him to take a leaf out of the book of the Barnoldswick workers and show some loyalty to Barnoldswick, the community and the iconic Rolls-Royce brand itself. If Rolls-Royce cares about its bottom line—we can all be sure that it does—that should force it back to the table, but time is running out. I want to take this opportunity to express my solidarity with the Rolls-Royce strikers. I once again offer my full support to them in this historic battle for that historic site, and I hope that other Members will offer their support and solidarity too.

Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) for introducing the debate.

It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris). He is absolutely right to speak up for the Rolls-Royce workers. We are seeing that the opportunities for employers come on the back of working people when they offshore jobs. That is one of the biggest threats to our economy, and I support Unite in its battles against employers who have done such things...

Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman is making some important points, but would he accept that there is no inevitability about this, and there is a role for Government? Yes, we need to identify potential growth areas that offer high-skill and high-wage jobs, but we should not simply abdicate from those areas where traditionally we have had a lead, for example in highly-skilled engineering at Rolls-Royce in Derby, and allow those jobs to be offshored, so we lose that potential forever more...

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