You may not be surprised to hear that the Musicians’ Union spends a lot of time grappling with the various challenges associated with Visiting Music Teachers’ pay and contracts, and nearly as much time lamenting the current state of employment law, which typically favours the employer over the worker. Now, the Labour government’s proposed Employment Reform Bill looks set to change all that. The Bill should improve the situation for irregular-hours workers across all sectors, including music teachers – or at least that’s the ambition.
Labour describes the Employment Reform Bill as ‘the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation’. It will:
- Ban zero-hours contracts. Legislation will ensure workers have a right to a contract reflecting the number of hours they regularly work, with reasonable notice of any change in shift patterns. This will put an end to ‘one-sided flexibility’, the government says.
- End ‘fire and rehire’ or ‘fire and replace’. The government will reform the law to provide effective remedies and replace the previous statutory code, which it describes as ‘inadequate’.
- Provide day-one rights on parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal for all workers, although employers will be able to operate probationary periods while they assess new hires.
- Remove the lower earnings limit on Statutory Sick Pay so it is available to all workers, and get rid of the three-day waiting period. Currently, 1.5m people earn below the lower earnings limit (£123 per week).
- Make flexible working the default from day one for all workers, with ‘employers required to accommodate this as far as is reasonable’.
- Make it unlawful to dismiss a woman who has had a baby for six months after her return to work, ‘except in specific circumstances’.
- Establish a new single enforcement body, the Fair Work Agency, to monitor the enforcement of workplace rights. Australia’s Fair Work Ombudsman could be a model here.
- Set up a Fair Pay Agreement in the adult social care sector. If this works, the government will assess whether such agreements could work in other sectors.
- Reinstate the School Support Staff Negotiating Body to establish national terms and conditions, career progression and pay rates for teachers and other school staff. This could be interesting in the context of negotiating terms for VMTs.
- Remove ‘unnecessary restrictions’ on trade union activity, including the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, to ensure industrial relations are based around ‘good faith negotiation and bargaining’.
- Simplify the process of statutory trade union recognition to ensure workers have a reasonable right to access a union in their place of work.
While these changes would be good news for workers, employers have already voiced their concerns, in particular about day-one employment rights. The bodies that represent business are likely to attempt to negotiate compromises to ensure that any changes do not disadvantage ‘economic growth’ – or, as those of us in the trade union movement might put it, their profit margins and their ability to pay workers as little as they can, with as few rights as possible.
The potential loss of zero-hour contracts is likely to concern particularly the hospitality and healthcare sectors, but music services and hubs will also be impacted. The Musicians’ Union has long criticised the use of zero-hour contracts in music teaching, where the illusion of flexibility is offered in the right to decline any offer of a new pupil or school – but once a teacher has agreed to a piece of work, there is no possibility of opting in or out of it from week to week. This is not a genuine zero-hour situation, so we are excited about the possibility of teachers on zero-hour contracts being given the chance to transition to more stable part-time employment.
A hazard of the potential changes could be if music teachers on zero-hour contracts are transitioned the other way – into self-employment, against their will. Dubious self-employment is endemic in music education, and we hope that the proposed Fair Work Agency will provide an effective route to challenge this and an alternative to the under-resourced Employment Tribunal system, for which waiting times can run into the years.
Of course, most employers in music education are not villainous capitalists – rather, they are small organisations running at a loss with insufficient funding. Their motivation for cutting teachers’ terms may not come from a place of pure profit, but it is cost saving nonetheless, and it ultimately amounts to teachers being asked to subsidise the delivery of music education by accepting poorer terms. It is time for teachers to be rewarded more appropriately for the vital work they do, which, ultimately, is the best way to safeguard quality music education.
