I entirely agree.
My SNP colleagues and I made it clear in November last year that we would oppose the UK Government’s proposals, and we oppose them now. We challenged the UK Government to think again about how they could provide the necessary guarantees and safeguards to shop workers in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. I was pleased that the Government tabled a new schedule in Committee—it now forms part of the Bill, although it is threatened with removal—that sought to amend the Employment Rights Act 1996 to give more explicit protection to shop workers opting out of Sunday work, including protections against such workers being discriminated. Our Labour colleagues have referred to the legal opinion that they obtained.
SNP Members welcome the extra protections for workers. They show that the UK Government can, when they want to, listen and, on occasion, act to do the right thing. The SNP commissioned its own legal opinion from a leading Scottish silk to examine the protections in detail. We are satisfied that they represent a significant increase in employment protection across the UK, and those protections would not have materialised without the SNP’s opposition.
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There remains, however, the issue of the implications of an effective UK-wide deregulation for the provision of premium pay in Scotland. The shop workers trade union, USDAW—I pay tribute to it and to its general secretary, John Hannett—has done a huge amount of work on this issue and has engaged extensively with parties across the Chamber and, indeed, across society. It has warned that the implication of the legislation, without safeguards, is that premium pay for Scottish workers, and indeed workers across the UK, will be threatened by erosion. The Scotland-based consultancy BiGGAR Economics has estimated that the loss of premium pay would affect some 60,000 workers in Scotland, with an estimated loss of income of up to £74 million a year.