The facts are clear: women would lose out if we quit the European Union, warns Harriet Harman
The polling – if it can be believed – shows voting intentions on whether to remain in or leave the European Union on a knife edge. And certainly we all meet many of the hundreds of thousands of people who say that they have yet to make up their mind, who want to know the facts.
It is no surprise that the debate around the EU has been so confusing when the institutions are baffling, the language impenetrable and the processes byzantine. The reality is that there is, inevitably, much speculation about what would happen if we left or stayed. But there are some clear facts about what our membership of the EU has meant in the past. And one of those facts is that the EU has been a strong friend of women at work.
The Treaty of Rome was extraordinarily ahead of its time in requiring signatories to commit to equal pay and equal treatment of women. And from the time that the United Kingdom joined in 1973 that guarantee has been there to back up women striving for their rights at work.
The EU, through directives and through judgements of the European court, has been at the heart of progress on women’s rights at work.
Some new rights for women have been initiated by the EU, some have been initiated by our own government but enhanced by the EU and some are guaranteed by the EU, meaning that they cannot be abolished or undermined.
On equal pay, the EU expanded the scope of our own laws. A woman could only claim under the Equal Pay Act 1970 if she could show that a man was doing a job that was the same or similar to hers. But the problem is that many women work in jobs where there are no men. The EU expanded the right to equal pay to include ‘equal pay for work of equal value’. That enabled women council cleaners to claim the same rates and bonuses as men who were paid much more to work in refuse collection.
Our Sex Discrimination Act 1975 gave part-time workers the right not to be treated less favourably than full-timers. But pensions were excluded from both the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act, which allowed employers to exclude their women part-timers from the company pension scheme. The EU removed the exemption and hundreds of thousands of women got a pension from their employer or the first time.
The EU guarantees that women have to get maternity leave and maternity pay. So any ‘Beecroft-style’ review in future will not be able to have the bright idea that we cut some of that ‘red tape’ or that particular sectors or regions can be exempted from the requirement to give maternity leave.
The EU requires employers to ensure that they are protecting their employees who are breastfeeding.
It also required that member states introduce paternity leave. That gave new fathers rights for the fist time which is important to them, to their child and to women. You cannot be equal at work while you are unequal at home.
The EU underpins our law that requires employers to protect women from sexual harassment. So long as we are in the EU, British women have that guarantee.
No government likes a directive from abroad. And no government likes a court ruling telling them what to do – let alone a foreign court. But though these directives and judgements might be annoying to government, they have been helpful to women. And that is a fact.
And next to the issue of what might happen if we leave. We would lose the guarantees on gender that the EU provides. That is a fact. What is a matter of judgement, though, is whether we still need those guarantees. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Iain Duncan Smith say we do not need those guarantees. But they are the last people who we should listen to when it comes to women’s rights. They have never lifted a finger to help women. On the contrary, they say they oppose the Social Chapter which these rights are part of. Some say that it is alarmist to suggest that there would be any proposals to cut back on women’s rights once the guarantees are gone, as everyone now accepts them. But why should we expect that people who opposed these rights so recently would not leap at the chance to repeal them? They would not say they were attacking women’s rights, they would call it ‘cutting red tape’ or ‘backing business’. The idea that we no longer need guarantees on women’s rights because we are in some post-feminist political nirvana is dangerous nonsense.
Why would we risk these important rights? We need to build on them and get more rights. Not use up our energy ghting to defend rights that, by virtue of being in the EU, we have already got.
We have seen the analysis about the number of jobs which would be vulnerable if we left the EU. And many of these are women’s jobs. Half a million women work in nancial services – not just in the City of London but also in Leeds, Edinburgh and Bristol. They would struggle if we did not have access into the EU. Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin would love to hoover up our nancial services jobs. And what would happen to the jobs of the one million women who work in the food and agricultural sector? Women have strengthened their position in the world of work over the last two decades doing jobs which are important to them, to their family and to the economy. It makes no sense, especially as the economy struggles to recover from the global financial crisis, to throw a question mark over those jobs.
Labour members worked hard in the run-up to the May elections. But now we are getting back out there to urge people to vote ‘In’. We know that twice as many women as men have yet to make up their mind. We know that young people are more likely to favour staying in but less likely to vote. We know that everyone needs reminding that EU migrants contribute more to our economy in taxes than they take out in benefits and that EU migrants are more likely to be working in our NHS than lying in a hospital bed. The vision of Britain’s future that the ‘Leave’ camp is offering sounds less like the 21st century and more like the 1950s. We do not want to turn back the clock to the 1950s. Trust me, I was there!