by Dan Cooke

I have been having a recurring nightmare lately that I go to work one morning and my boss has been replaced by Eric Pickles.

Maybe it stems from guilt that I let my office pot plant fade from neglect, when there are others not allowed to have them. Or it may be a deeper fear of what could be exposed and corrected. Can it be right that my employer subsidises my lunch every day? What about the free language lessons? And, even more embarrassing, the “Thai head massages at your desk” promised in my offer letter… I never did find out exactly what this meant but I know what Pickles would make of it.

But then I remember: I work in the private sector, so Eric can’t touch me. Thank goodness it’s only on TV that you can get a line manager like that (think The Office).

But a different type of guilt – and a different worry – persists when I ponder the pillorying of public sector “perks” like sandwiches in meetings and a work mobile phone that, in the jobs I’ve had, were simply things provided so you could do the job. Do government employees really deserve such different conditions from those in the private sector for similar work? And can their terms really be attacked without influencing the norms in the private sector as well?

Current Westminster debate on the workplace is often a battle of abstract buzzwords: “efficiency”, “flexibility”, “empowerment”, “security” and others. But in lunch-break conversations up and down the country, in the private as well as public realms, employees are more worried whether they will have to start paying to use the coffee machine and whether they can get help with a taxi home if they work late.

If Labour wants to break through, we need to understand this and have policies that relate to the concerns expressed around the water cooler. That may even mean a fight to keep the water cooler – and the kitchen and the other spaces people have in offices to keep a bit of balance and sanity in their hectic working days.

In such matters, decisions in the public sector – and above all the tone in which they are explained – send a powerful message about what is acceptable for all. So, when it is ridiculed as ludicrous and unjustifiable to use a small, windowless box room as a place that civil servants can have paid-for massages, then this affects all workers – public or private, blue collar, white collar or dress-down casual.

More tangibly, as further public services are inevitably outsourced to private providers, their employee benefits are likely to be scrutinised to the same standards (even as high profits and executive pay at the same outsourcers are justified as the rewards due from efficiency). Unless the fight-back starts soon, more and more people will wake up to find that the nightmare of Picklesian puritanism is the reality of their working day.

So while the government strategy is to divide public and private workers by stirring suspicion and envy, Labour needs to counter with strong advocacy of good working conditions in both sectors. Ed Miliband has rightly argued that New Labour did not have enough to say about the way people work, not just what they are paid, and this is a prospectus on which he must be built. The pressure to work longer hours is a major issue, as Ed has indicated, and new threats to security of employment matter too. But concern should also extend to the environment people work in and the benefits in kind which many good employers provide  – and more should – to show staff that they are valued and help them balance work with other commitments.

A good start, to show Labour gets it, would be to raise the alarm over the proposals from the office of tax simplification in December to abolish tax relief on employer-provided luncheon vouchers and the cost of late-night taxis home for staff on overtime. These “tax simplifications” are under review at the same time as proposals to streamline corporation tax by allowing companies to avoid tax on overseas branches or subsidiaries in tax havens. Choices like this reveal a government that favours Davos man over “mondeo man”. Labour must show that it can stand up to it on behalf of middle England.

Next, we need our own review of workplace benefits. This should draw on best practices in the UK and abroad in employee childcare, travel, health and wellbeing and include proposals for how to reward good employers and encourage more to follow them. As part of this, we need to recognise that small businesses will often be particularly nervous of being asked to do more but will also benefit if they can match what larger employers can offer staff.

So, rather than abolishing existing reliefs on employee benefits we should consider re-focussing them. More generous allowances should be given to smaller companies, while they could be tapered away for larger ones, which can be encouraged in other ways such as a code of best practice and the obligation to “comply or explain” (as with corporate governance now).

Labour has always seen itself as the party of working people. This heritage rightly takes account of issues, as relevant today as ever before, such as unfair dismissal and the right to organise at work. But we know that, on their own, these do not always speak strongly to enough people to win support in areas where levels of public employment and unionisation are lower. However, this is no reason to stop thinking about the workplace as the key to winning future support; rather we need to update and broaden our understanding of what this means.

So I hope at the next election we will regularly see Ed Miliband in the gleaming canteens of some of Britain’s best employers, praising their example of how to treat staff and hearing, in turn, of their own gains from improved morale and productivity. That would be smart politics. It would also point the way to a Britain in which good conditions are more widespread in the private sector, secure in the public sector and everywhere a source of pride not ridicule. And to a Britain in which nocturnal visions of Eric Pickles need intrude on no worker’s slumber.

Dan Cooke is a Labour activist and lawyer.

Tags: Dan Cooke, Eric Pickles, Picklesian puritanism, tax reliefs, workplace benefits

This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2011 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Uncut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.