Question: USDAW workers are at the front line of flexible working hours and practices. Has the government delivered on family friendly working rights?

Bill Connor: There's been some great steps forward. We still have our concerns about the need to outlaw zero hour contracts. A lot of people have no specific contract stability but the hours are moved up simply at the employer's whims with little notice to the workers themselves. And we certainly think in terms of general provision of society, if you look at nursery care, and the facility for women to first of all get beyond the problem of equal pay and lack of opportunity, if you're going to make family friendly working rights a fully rounded issue, you've got to open up a wide range of specific statutory rights. We think some welcome moves have been made but we're a bit concerned that part time workers rights aren't being treated as well as they should.

Question: How stressed are retail workers with this zero hours approach?

Bill Connor: Well to many of them, the worry is that it leaves them virtually in a position where the employers can switch them on and off like a tap, a resource without any real stability. The hours can vary from week to week. This plays havoc with childcare arrangements and of course income stability. In Europe this is described as ` precarious employment `

Question: How many people are affected?

Bill Connor: We don't know - one of the problems we have is that employers deny the existence of zero hours and some will add a flexible contract where a person has a minimum contract of 5 hours, and the maximum of 36. And it means if you want to take extra jobs to supplement your income, you are bound to the original primary employer to be available for all 36 hours or 5 hours, or whatever the employer wants. So we think firstly that zero hours contracts in themselves should be basically outlawed. And a basis of mutuality in contracts be restablished between the employee and the employer. John Monks TUC General Secretary describes this as ` positive flexibility `.

We've sent a suggestion to the government in a paper some time ago that we could have a banded range of working hours that gave workers an element of security and stability and the employers an element of flexibility. If you take French hypermarkets for example, where the situation is that no worker can be expected or required to work more than 20 per cent extra on top of their contracted working week. So you're working 15 hours but no more than 18 hours. If the employer wants you to work more than 18 he has to put another band on - say 18 to 25 or whatever.

In Britain, part-time workers have little contract stability and because it's a 24 hour society, the employer obviously moves the hours around the 168 hours to suit production or service requirements and control costs.

Question: How is morale with retail sector workers?

Bill Connor: I think since we introduced the minimum wage, the working families' tax credit, childcare tax credit and moving forward on things like stake holder pensions, and we've made some headway in terms of addressing the equal rights issue, morale generally is much better than it was. I think there's a long way to go because I think retail workers are not sufficiently valued in the economy, but that's not something that has occurred in the last few years - that's been an age long dilemma -if you work in a factory doing a job of not dissimilar skills you're making two or three times than you get in the retail sector. So we've got an ongoing battle to put that type of work into a much higher salary bracket and much higher level of appreciation.

Question: Why is the government always fairly cautious to legislate in the issue of family friendly working hours do you think?

Bill Connor: I think part of the problem is this argument that if you have too many regulations, they act as an inhibitor on business performance. We've found in the good companies, such as Littlewoods where you've got a family friendly programme for maybe the past two and a half decades, is that they take the view that if you treat your workers right, give them some sense of security, make sure they're not involved in precarious forms of employment, you can get your return that way. And whilst we've gone along with certain levels of flexibility, it's got to be what the TUC calls 'positive flexibility'.

Question: What about part time workers - are they receiving the employment protection they deserve?

Bill Connor: In general pay terms in most of our agreements means part timers will get pro-rata, with the exception of pensions - on some occasions there are problems of training. But I think that there is a still a gap between perceptions - I think people still see part time workers as not properly part of the work force. And yet in our sector - retail and distribution - they are the predominant form of employment.

Question: Why don't part-time workers receive sufficient training?

Bill Connor: If you look at training in the retail sector, it tends to be towards the higher managerial jobs, towards full timers and towards males. So many part-time workers are missing out on the opportunities to escape from that low paid ghetto into high paid, more career development type jobs.

Question: Do you think they should be doing something to try to end this 24-7 work culture?

Bill Connor: One of the problems we've got is, and we've found this in the experience in the States is that many stores are trying to move away from 24 hours opening because the business isn't there. But once that facility has been offered to the public it's very hard to get off that kind of treadmill. Workers experience problems of security, particularly with people travelling on public transport at night and the increasing level of violence, particularly in the inner city areas. The fact that the employer tends to try and stretch the labour force to meet the precise variations in the patterns of consumers, and the worker tends to be bobbing along like a cork on the waves. And we've basically lost any serious protection overall in terms of trading hours.

All we have under the Sunday Trade Act is that a worker doesn't have to work on a Sunday if they don't want to. The one thing we are campaigning on though is we'd like to make Christmas Day - certainly for stores of above 3,000 square feet - a non-trading day. Now I think there's popular support from the industry and I don't think there's any demand from the major players, and if the government legislated now there would be a small piece of regulation, there'd still be 150 hours a week when people could trade in the larger stores and all you'd have is one day in the year that it wasn't available. So we did try to push a Private Member's Bill through but, whilst this gained widespread support from MPs, and 150,000 people signed our petition in support of our campaign, it's passage through the House of Commons was halted by the General Election. We will now be trying to launch an initiative in the House of Lords in this Parliament.

Question: Tony Blair and his family come from a religious background - have you not appealed to them on those grounds?

Bill Connor: Well we tried when we defeated the government in 1986 it was the first serious defeat of the previous government. It was basically that concord of interest of the bishops and religious elements that won the day. I think the difficulty is this argument that people should be free to choose what they want to do. Now we accept that providing that their freedom doesn't impinge on somebody else's freedom. And I think to take one day, which whatever your religious persuasion is seen as both a Christian day, a family day, it's a universally recognised day, to do that would not pour any kind of grief on commercial enterprise but it would be a major benefit to our workers to close stores on Christmas Day.

Question: You criticised the government over youth pay and minimum wage. Do you see any connection between youth pay and voter apathy? Is the government missing a trick here?

Bill Connor: I think young people themselves feel undervalued, under appreciated, and to some extent are used as a large pool of cheap labour. We were very upset because we successfully made the case to the National Policy Forum, we think the economic arguments are quite clear but they've been ignored.

In fact in a number of agreements major companies pay the rate for the job irrespective of age. And we think the minimum wage should be paid at 18. 16-17 year olds should get probably 80 per cent-90 per cent of the wage. Sadly, we suspect that the dead hand of the Treasury has been operating in the background and ministers are taking a kind of theoretical economic view on pay for young workers which is simply not justified by the evidence.

Question: Do you think the Government is too influenced by the supermarkets?

Bill Connor: No I think it's purely an economic view from the Treasury. I think all of the people we deal with, the major players like Tescos, Sainsburys, Safeways, they all pay full rate at 18. Littlewoods, which has a retail and mail order business and used to have a pools industry, until the National Lottery was introduced, pay actually the full rate irrespective of age.

Question: So the big players set a good example?

Bill Connor: Yes they have no problem. The people who do have a problem are the very low-end employers who are probably guilty of breaching the minimum wage anyway and there are no economic arguments against it. The Treasury is worried about the effect on the New Deal. Which is nonsense and based, in our opinion, on unjustified prejudice.

Question: So exactly the people that the government should be protecting - people working for the small companies?

Bill Connor: It's going to become more pronounced when we increase the minimum wage to £4.10 and the youth wage is £3.50. We think a number of employers will be unable to resist the temptation to exploit this anomaly.

Question: How many people could be affected by this?

Bill Connor: We don't know for sure but I'd imagine hundreds of thousands of young people will lose out as a result of this.

Question: Where are you in the debate of the rights for workers with young children to chose to work part time?

Bill Connor: I think these things can't come just by straight pieces of statute. I think it has to be a kind of developmental change in society and whilst we accept that it should be made easier for workers to return back to the work place, we think there has to be some balance between areas where the employers are not able to fulfil that requirement and I think it then gets down to a question of bargaining.

If workers need that flexibility then unions will have to ensure employers are persuaded as to the mutual advantage of having a working environment which is sensitive and appreciative of the needs of working parents. For many of our super markets you've got anything between 120 and 140 different working shifts and that suits the company objectives and at the same time they can slot workers into those particular patterns. I think we're realistic, that's why the absolute right to demand a return to part time employment in areas where that wasn't reasonable would actually set back the progress on family friendly. So I think it's going to be persuasive and developmental, it's got to be a cultural change, there's got to be an acceptance that the industry where it can be, given its own circumstances, should be responsive to the needs and demands of its employees. There should be some backing from the law that when the employer gives them an unreasonable response you should be able to take some action.

Question: The government has introduced new measures on employment tribunals - you now have to pay £100 to launch a tribunal and you could face legal costs if you lose. A welcome development?

Bill Connor: We think that's absolutely disgraceful. The whole basis of tribunals since their introduction is to provide free access to justice. Unions in the main take those cases up, a high proportion of the cases get settled. Probably one per cent of cases get to tribunal. It seems to me to be a denial of justice to actually place that kind of a pressure on the worker because employers and unions are pretty good at determining what they should take forward. If we think a case can't be defended and can't stand up on its own merits we won't proceed to a tribunal. And probably around half the cases get turned down because that criteria is applied.

We are also concerned at any suggestions that costs should be awarded against workers seeking justice through our generally unbalanced legal system. This will act as a deterrent against people seeking justice. We'll be pressing for this to be ditched. It really is a bad move.

Question: But the government would argue that the number of employment tribunals has risen significantly over the years and it's an attempt to try and stem the growth?

Bill Connor: Well there are other aspects to that - one is that there are more people in employment. Secondly more people are treated unfairly because of the practices of employers and the lack of legal protection in contract terms - they've still got to wait 12 months before they can actually seek any justice. The high cost of the employment tribunals is the engagement over the last 2 decades of more and more lawyers. Years ago they were kind of semi-informal tribunals where the chairman of the tribunal provided the legal validity and then the parties of the employers and workers provided the evidence on particular cases. And what you can find is that you look at trade unions generally and we probably have a lower proportion of cases going to tribunal because we've got grievance procedures and good working practices. I would imagine that quite a high proportion of tribunals come from places where there is no union recognition, no fair practices and no fair procedure. What would be far better if the government came out and made a very strong public statement to encourage collective bargaining and effective representation and we could solve these issues in the workplace rather than go to a court of law.

Question: So why has the government done this? Are they caving in to business do you think?

Bill Connor: The CBI has made heavy weather of the so-called tribunals problem. I think it's a mixture of things. Any government tends to think, like they do with the congestion charges, like they do with the pollution taxes, like they do with work place car parking tax, is that if you suddenly place a penalty that stops the process. Now it doesn't. What it does is it does damage to certain individuals. And a far better way is to encourage employers and workers, through trade union representation in our view, to actually solve these issues in the work place to start with, rather than take a work place issue for subsequent legal determination. And it really is the wrong approach. If you spoke to the unions, they could give a more intelligent analysis of what's gone wrong with tribunals. This certainly will be fiercely opposed by all the trade unions, not just the TUC, because it's entirely the wrong road.

Question: The government has launched a campaign to improve security in retail outlets. Are retail workers experiencing more verbal and physical attacks in the work place?

Bill Connor: There's been an incredible increase over the years, both on actual physical assaults, verbal assaults and intimidation, which quite often have a worse psychological effect on a worker than an actual physical attack. We've been working now for five years with the British Retail Consortium, analysing the incidents, trying to find security measures that will prevent them. What you do find is that a general level of violence in society and acceptance of violence starts to spill into the work place itself. And we welcome the fact that the government is now treating this as a serious issue which needs adequate funding. As long ago as1985 the TUC organised a major conference on violence at work, covering all industrial sectors and at long last the government has recognised it as an industrial problem. And we've found where the good employers genuinely wanted to reduce violence and deter violent activity and we work with them, we can get some results out there. But more needs to be done because workers in many areas are scared to go to work and suffer incredibly.

Question: What's causing the rise in these attacks?

Bill Connor: I think just the way society has generally broken down. I think the question of respect for each other, may be in some areas, drugs, maybe the people feel in areas of extremely high unemployment alienated by society, and I think the kind of respect factor in work places is basically gone. Some of our people in the front line, particularly in off-licences are in serious difficulty. And there are limitations on what you can do with security measures. One of the first things the employers have got to have is effective practices, they've got a good physical constraints, they've got to make sure that goods are merchandised in a manner that is not going to leave themselves open to theft. We've got to work with the government and probably the police authorities in reducing the overall level of violent crime. It is a rising problem and whilst it's being curbed in certain areas the overall level of violence has risen in society as well as our toleration of violence.

Question: There's a major debate going on about private sector involvement in the public services. As a union that operates very much in the private sector, what benefits do you think private sector management could bring to the public services?

Bill Connor: Well already we've got a significant private sector involvement in the public services and that's always been the case - especially in the provision of materials for local government, in the provision of services to hospitals. And increasingly over a number of years with the Tories' privatisation programme, more and more of our public services have been hived off to private enterprise. And when we looked at the performance of those organisations who've taken over the public service activities, there's been a mixed bag. In some areas there's been success, in many areas there's been what can only be described as abysmal failures.

The Prime Minister's recent speech concentrated on good examples from the private sector and omitted to mention the many areas where public service staff provided a first class service. The trade unions accept that the government has now got pressure from the public to improve public services. The best way to do that is to restore the public service ethos, to take public sector workers seriously in terms of pay and conditions, to look at the managerial structures, to look at where money is targeted and also to look at the skill levels of people in the public services.

So we don't believe there's any evidence that private sector is good and public sector is bad. I think what you've got to do is analyse each area and come up with practical plans for improvement, in consultation with public sector workers and their unions. Many people would ask the question ` why should the public service, provided by public subscription, be in actual fact, turned over so people can make a profit out of it? It should really be something where there's a break-even basis, providing a service based on taxation and other forms of government funding, rather than saying to someone here's a bunch of catering workers, slash the wages by 40 per cent, reduce the workforce by 10 per cent and you can make a profit. That doesn't improve public services.

Question: A number of unions are reviewing their funding to the Labour Party - is that something you are doing?

Bill Connor: No, we are one of the few unions who are affiliated to our full level of membership in terms of the political levy. We also believe that it's critical that we make a distinction between the Labour Party and the Labour government. We think unions need to have an honest influence on Labour government policies and if we need to have a party that's resourced and funded properly and is not relying on the handouts of millionaires and people with vested interests, the unions will have a proper structured link. We think it's entirely the wrong message to start talking about reducing party funding. So we were the second largest contributor to the Labour Party General Election campaign, in terms of funds, and the result was extremely important to our members. So we think it's money well spent. So we have no intention of going down that road.

Question: Money well spent but what's your message to the government on employment rights?

Bill Connor: I think the thing we would say is that the government, many of us feel, was disproportionately swayed in its first term by the influence of business. Part of that is for historical reasons that we've been seen as a party linked to trade unions only. We've seen the party branded with the tax and spend tag, described as the party of economic incompetence. We've gone beyond those tests and we think the agenda, last time round, was balanced too much in favour of the CBI. We do understand the political considerations that drove the government to do that - we did get a first term and now a second term.

We think most of the unions are now committed to working in partnership with employers in industry - the TUC has been a very big promoter of this. And we think Tony Blair should see the unions as allies in his bid to improve the country and improve people's potential and improve public services, not people who are locked into the past. Many of us have transformed our unions, not as much as we'd liked to but obviously it's an ongoing process. So we think the Labour Party has got to listen more to the other side of the equation, to the workers, who were the only ones who supported them in 18 years of four Tory governments.

Question: But can you see this government really introducing new employment rights?

Bill Connor: I think it depends on confidence. There was a lot of preoccupation with the minimum wage in the first term and it was set at a modest level. We didn't oppose that. That seems to have gone down remarkably well. We had the first flush of employment rights and employment legislation. It didn't give us all that we wanted but what it has done is change the climate. We get more new agreements signed, we're striking more partnership agreements with employers and we've raised our level of membership and we're increasing the confidence and the skill of workers.

And I think provided that it's thought out, providing it's proportionate, I think the time is now right for new employment relations rights because we're really behind other European countries in our legislative provision. I think with a little confidence, the Government should now embark on a review of the Employment Relations Act, which we were promised when the legislation was introduced.