Essentially it as an option written into the EU Temporary Agency Work Directive that allows member States to insert a provision into their transposing legislation that says that where an agency worker is directly employed by an agency they are not protected by the equal treatment provisions in the Directive. The UK Regulations, which come into force in October, make use of the “Swedish” derogation.

To illustrate the effect by example, Jo has been signed up to the Slog Agency and they place her with various local companies where she works as a temporary receptionist. From October, when the Agency Work Regulations come into force, the companies where she goes to work would be obliged to give her the same rates of pay as their permanent receptionists after she has been there for 12 weeks. However, using the “Swedish” derogation, Slog takes her onto their books as an employee. In other words she has become an employee of Slog with a contract of employment – she is no longer an agency worker strictly speaking, even though she works for an agency. Slog is now solely responsible for paying her, setting her working hours and so on.

Although this gives Jo the basic employment protection to which employees (as opposed to agency workers) are entitled – for example better maternity rights, the right to claim unfair dismissal (after a year – soon going up to two years if the Government gets its way) and so on, it means that when Slog sends her to an assignment with another company she can legally be paid less than someone directly employed by the that company, thus potentially undercutting agreed rates of pay in that workplace.

The other problem with the “Swedish” derogation is that the UK regulations have stretched the provisions of the Directive to the extent that an agency can employ an agency worker and only give them a minimal amount of paid work for a week, but because they are an employee of the agency they have to be available to take work when it comes in. This means that they could end up earning very little in a bad week.

Unite’s motion asks the TUC to explore the potential for a legal challenge to the UK Regulations, which the TUC will now do. Unite has observed a significant recent increase in the use of the “Swedish” derogation and is concerned that it is being used to avoid the equal treatment provisions that underpin the Directive.

I started with history and I will end with more of it. It took several years to persuade the former Government to stop blocking the Agency Worker Directive in Brussels. What eventually emerged was a unique legal formulation based on a UK Social Partner (TUC, CBI and Government) agreement. The “Swedish” derogation was not wanted by the TUC but was one of the concessions that had to be made in order to get a Directive at all. Although the TUC did get a caveat inserted into the “Swedish” derogation, it was rendered feeble by the transposition. It is on that point that the Congress has now asked the TUC to take action. Of course this would have to be done with a close eye on any risks and unintended consequences but external advice will be sought and the General Council will take a decision based on that advice.

Last May the Coalition Agreement assured people that it would:

“hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age start to rise to 66, although it would not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.”

But a few weeks ago you could hear the tyres screech and smell burning tar when the government published new plans to accelerate the increase in the state pension age to 2018 for women, and then increase both men and women’s state pension ages to 66 by 2020. This is particularly bad news for women aged 56 or 57, giving them very little time to prepare or amend existing plans.

Bald statistics such as these often have very little impact on the public, which is why the TUC welcomes today’s campaign launch featuring Barbara’s story. Spearheaded by Labour’s Pensions’ Spokesperson Rachel Reeves MP, the campaign features an online petition which describes exactly who will lose out from this broken promise.

Almost 5 million people will be affected by the government’s new plans; in particular 500,000 women will now have to work for a year or longer, 33,000 will have to work for two years longer before they can claim their state pension.

Read Barbara’s story here and if you want to support her, sign the petition. The TUC Women’s Conference next month will be debating these unacceptable changes to our pensions.

Gender pay inequality is a deeply embedded form of discrimination at work. Usually, but not always, unintentionally employers value work done by women less highly than work done by men, sometimes even where men and women are doing the same job.

Furthermore for historical and social reasons, women tend to do jobs such as childcare, hairdressing, cooking and these jobs have traditionally been less well paid than jobs such as engineering that have been done by men. This occupational gender job segregation is the main cause of unequal pay.

Trade unions have done a fantastic job in advancing equal pay through a combination of collective bargaining and strategic litigation – most of the landmark cases that have improved the law have been taken by unions. Equal pay is a systemic problem that can only effectively be challenged through collective means; one problem with the equal pay legislation is that it relies on individual claims and is slow and difficult to use.

Despite sex discrimination in pay systems being illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1970, there is still a gender pay gap of nearly 17% for full time workers and a staggering 36% gap for part time workers. This means that on average, men are paid 17% more than women for doing work of equal value to society and to their employer. If any other piece of legislation had failed so spectacularly there would have been a national outcry but for whatever reasons, apart from what unions have achieved, not a great deal has been done to ensure that gender pay equality is achieved. It is a sad indictment of our society that a car mechanic is valued at a much higher rate than a nursery school teacher; what is more important to our society – cars or children?

One way of moving things along would be to find out, employer by employer, who is paid what and for which job. This can be done by conducting a pay audit in each company, or in some way ensuring that pay systems are transparent. The TUC  believes that the Equal Pay Act of 1970 should have been reviewed as part of the Equality Act to legislate for pay transparency. The Act allows for mandatory auditing in the future but only if the voluntary approach still fails to deliver and not until 2013 at the earliest. The voluntary approach to equal pay audits and transparency hasn’t worked: by 2005 only a third of large employers had completed one. There needs to be a change in legislation to catch the ‘laggards’ as recommended by Denise Kingsmill in the 2001 Government commissioned review of the gender pay gap.

There are other issues that determine how much women are paid. Women are usually the parent who takes on the majority of childcare and caring responsibilities for disabled or elderly family members. Flexible working opportunities need to become more widespread. Women often become stuck in low skilled, part time work simply because it is all that is available on a part time basis. The TUC welcomes the recent review of the right to request to work flexibly and the Government’s commitment to extend that right to parents of school age children but ideally we would like it to apply to every worker. Industries that have been male-dominated often do not provide the career break or flexible working opportunities or may have workplace cultures that are unattractive to the women who enter them.

Organisations have got better at retaining women post-maternity leave (e.g. with right to request) but more needs to be done to help those who have had career breaks and dropped out the labour market get back into employment. Employers could offer targeted skills refresher courses. They should also ensure their apprenticeship and development schemes encourage mid-career applicants to apply, rather than just aiming them at young people

There is potential within the gender equality duty, which is not yet realised. It places a clear obligation on public sector organisations – councils, hospitals, Government departments and so on – to take action to tackle the gender pay gap but it was only introduced in April 2007. It has now been weakened by the Equality Act because of the way in which the Government intends to implement it. It is not yet clear how easy it is going to be in future to enforce the duty and if it is not easy to enforce it is less likely to be taken seriously.

The public sector could use procurement to get the private sector to take action to close the gap. This is a way of ensuring that public money is spent in a way that promotes public policy and could encourage the private sector to implement measures to close the gender pay gap.

Finally, there is the important issue of education and training for girls and women. Are schools and universities giving young women good career advice and equipping them with necessary future skills? Can better educational and workplace training combat the current skills shortage? How can occupational segregation be better tackled? Employers need to ensure that women who enter male-dominated occupations are retained. For example, half a million women in UK have science engineering and technology qualifications but less than a third work in those sectors when they leave school or college or graduate. Girls need a lot of encouragement to persuade them that they can and should be competing with men for all jobs – and men need to be encouraged to see “women’s” jobs as worth doing, including being better paid. It’s a vicious circle but there are some encouraging signs – far more men are now qualifying as nurses and secretaries and far more women are qualifying as doctors and solicitors. But there is still a long way to go, especially with the less skilled jobs.

We’ll get there, as it makes sense in every way in today’s society. But we can’t let it take another thirty years!

Let’s start at the beginning though. Something goes wrong at work. There is a dispute between an employee and their employer. If there is a union recognised the chances are that the matter will be resolved with union help and no need for litigation. There are far fewer Employment Tribunal cases involving unionised workplaces.

Where there is no union it may be harder to have the matter resolved at work, and certainly if the employee has been dismissed it is too late. The next stage is to go to the Employment Tribunal, or to seek an out of court settlement. This is where ACAS comes into its own, with an automatic offer to intervene and provide conciliation. This often resolves the matter, or at least allows the employee to be compensated when they have been wrongly treated. If not, then it has to be the Employment Tribunal. Very few employees actually want to go to the Tribunal, but if that is what it takes, then they have a right to do so.

To introduce a charge would be an unacceptable obstacle to getting access to justice. It would hit the low paid and the unemployed particularly hard. Even if there were to be a waiver for unemployed claimants the business lobby is also demanding a much more aggressive costs regime to frighten unrepresented employees away.

If those two deterrents do not work they want tougher measures to weed out “weak” and “vexatious” claims. They are conveniently forgetting that there is already a process for dealing with the latter. The former is dangerous; who decides whether or not a claim is “weak”? That is what the Tribunal is for; they already have preliminary procedures that discourage weak claims.

However, they do not, and should not have powers to actually stop them, unless they fail to clear some straightforward legal threshold such as not being in their job long enough to make a particular claim.

 But even in what look like clear cut cases of ineligibility, there may be room for argument. The full Tribunal may be needed to determine whether or not they have the qualifying length of service, or whatever the prerequisite may be.

Employment Tribunal statistics are misleading; they count big multiple claims as a large number of individual cases.  This means that where a union wants to challenge a pay grading system on equality grounds they have to take many individual claims, rather than a representative claim on behalf of a group of employees.

This distorts the figures. What is basically a single argument – is this grading system legal? – gets counted multiple times.  The answer to that is to start allowing representative claims.  This odd way of collecting statistics also means that business lobby arguments are based on a false premise. The numbers of claims are a very small percentage of the number of people in work. It would be more sensible to ask why there are so few claims, given the likely level of abuse at work.

The TUC is an enthusiastic champion of workplace dispute resolution – most effectively done where there is a recognised union. Where there is not, then ACAS must be given sufficient resources to provide solutions out of court where possible – and to give neutral advice to both parties.

We will vigorously resist any attempts to restrict access to justice, while working to promote workplace dispute resolution. In particular we will work with Citizen’s Advice and other consumer bodies to resist any attempt to restrict justice to those who can afford to pay.

Let’s look at their main proposals, as no doubt some of them will be attractive to some in Government – we learned under the Thatcher Government that one day’s mad idea could rapidly become tomorrow’s Parliamentary Bill.

On Strikes they do not seem to have much theoretical knowledge, let alone any practical experience. Industrial action has been declining on a yearly basis since the early 1990s. Unions only ask their members to take industrial action when negotiations have failed. Policy Exchange do not point out that in the vast majority of cases unions successfully negotiate agreements with employers on pay and working conditions. Indeed in unionised workplaces there are far fewer Employment Tribunal cases because individual as well as collective disputes are generally handled internally through dialogue and agreement.

Strike ballot papers and information to employers is a heavily regulated area already. I wonder if the Policy Exchange wonks have actually seen let alone read the statutory Code of Practice on Industrial Action? Unions have to go through many administrative hurdles and delays before they can legally take industrial action. That is how employers have managed to obtain court injunctions stopping strikes on minor technical breaches. For example, BA obtained an injunction against Unite on the grounds that a handful of spoilt ballot papers had not been notified to the employer. This was despite the fact that over 90% of the members who were balloted had supported the strike. It is profoundly unfair to allow the courts to override the freely expressed will of employees.

Any further restrictions on industrial action ballots and notices would be likely to have the unintended effect of provoking far more wildcat action, which is not in anyone’s best interest in the long run.

Introducing a 40% threshold into strike ballots would be a hurdle that does not exist anywhere else in voting legislation. It would mean that those who abstained or forgot to vote would count as “no” votes. If this rule were to be applied to Parliamentary elections very few MPs would now be sitting in Parliament.

Allowing agency workers to be employed to cover jobs done by striking workers would not only break international laws and conventions but would undermine what is a basic human right – the right to withdraw one’s labour.  It would be doing it in a horrible way too – putting agency workers in an invidious position – and would undermine employment relations even further in a situation where there was already a dispute and bad employment relations.

The Policy Exchange proposals on union monopolies seem to have missed the fact that the closed shop no longer exists and workers are absolutely free to join or not join whatever union they want. The vast number of recognition agreements between unions and employers are voluntary and fully supported by the employer. A number of large successful companies in the UK recognise unions on a voluntary basis because they understand the benefits of giving employees an independent voice at work.

The claims of taxpayers paying for union are presumably an attack on paid time off in the public sector for union reps to do their union work. The work that union reps do in their paid time off involves working with employers on health and safety issues, representing their members in grievance and disciplinary hearings, negotiating pay settlements on behalf of large groups of workers (thus saving endless individualised pay setting) and providing learning and training opportunities which help workers to gain the skills and qualifications that benefit not just them but also their employer.

The proposals on political funding are purely and simply an attack on the Labour Party, exposing this “policy” paper for what it really is. They neglect to mention that those unions that want to fund political parties have to have membership wide postal ballots to establish a political fund, which have to be re-run every ten years. As well as that there is an individual opt-out where a political fund is set up, which has to be made clear in writing to all members. Curiously, opting out rather than opting in is a principle much favoured in David Cameron’s favourite book, “Nudge”. Too much regulation is a terrible thing except when it comes to unions, where apparently much more is needed.