Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People
Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People
Labour’s New Deal for Working People is our plan to make work pay. It’s how we’ll boost wages, make work more secure and support working people to thrive – delivering a genuine living wage, banning exploitative zero hour contracts, and ending fire and rehire.
Direct PDF Link, PDF archive. I'd suggest bookmarking the archive as parties have a habit of deleting stuff from past elections (e.g. Labour have deleted the PDF for their 2019 manifesto).
Lot's of waffling but here are the key policies I managed to pick out:
- Ban 0-hour contracts, "ensuring everyone has the right to have a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, based on a twelve-week reference period"
- End the practice of fire-and-rehire
- Worker protections from day one
- Merge the current three-tier employment status into two categories of 'worker' and 'genuinely self-employed'
- Strengthen redundancy rights
- Strengthen protections for the self-employed
- Family working
- Make 'flexi-time' contracts the default (work hours that fit around children)
- Ban firing women for six months after returning from maternity leave
- Review the parental leave system within the first year of government
- Right to bereavement leave for all workers
- Ensure that surveillance technology can't be introduced without consultation
- Make it so minimum wage considers the cost of living when calculating it
- Remove age brackets from minimum wage
- Remove the lower earnings limit and waiting period for statutory sick pay
- Ensure hospitality workers receive the tips they earn
- Ban unpaid internships, except when part of education or training course
- Establish a new 'Fair Pay Agreement' for adult social care workers
- Reinstate the School Support Staff Negotiating Body
- Remove "unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity and ensuring industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining"
- Repeal the Trade Union Act 2016 and Minimum Service Levels (Strikes) Bill and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022
- Allow electronic and workplace balloting for union votes
- Remove the requirement for unions to prove at least 50% employee support to be recognised and make final ballot a simple majority
- Give unions the right to access the workplace for recruitment and organising purposes
- Strengthen protection for trade union reps
- Close the gender pay gap
- Include outsourced workers in calculations
- Require firms with >250 staff to publish ethnicity and disability pay gaps
- Require employers to provide support to employees going through menopause
- Establish a single enforcement body for worker rights to replace the current fragmented system
- Double the time limit where employees can bring a claim to an employment tribunal to six months
- Allow workers to raise grievances to ACAS collectively
- Extent the Freedom of Information Act to companies that have public contracts and publicly funded associations
- Require public bodies to asses if work can be done more efficiently in-house before outsourcing to the private sector
- Ensure public contract take into account 'social value' when being given out (e.g. local jobs, pay, trade union recognition)
Promises with no real policy attached:
- Strengthen protections for whistleblowers
- Help carers in the workforce
- Give rights to people who work from home to be able to separate life from work
- Ensure "regulations on travel time in sectors with multiple working sites is enforced and that workers’ contracts reflect the law" (this is copied verbatim twice across the document)
- Bring employment tribunals 'up to standard'
- Review health and safety regulations
- Review guidance on working in extreme temperatures
- Protections for people with long Covid
- Increased legal duty for employers to tackle sexual harassment
They also say the terminally ill deserve "security and decency", but don't actually propose anything other than encouraging employers and trade unions to sign the Dying to Work Charter.
A thing not picked up above, but this document spends a lot of time batting for employers. Every mention of improving protections or abusive practices is accompanied with some statement along the lines of "most employers are already really good to their employees" or "ensure there is a good talent pool for employers".
On the whole. The list of actual changes is def a seperation from tory activity.
Ive been very vocal about how little has been offered. Up to now.
But this os clearly a positive collection of improovements.
Honestly a bit of a we dont hate employers. Most are doing great. Dosent bother much. Even if its untrue most employers are doing well. I can tolerate a little creeping if these proposals are actually going to happen under Starmer.
Spose I better watch out. Im starting to look positive.
Positivity? In a UK politics community??? What is the world coming to.
End of a 14 year dark period.
A handy corrective for anyone who still believes Labour won't make a difference or are somehow the same as the Tories.
All sounds very nice, I doubt much will see the light of day, but to be honest if they just got rid of the age range minimum wages and employment rights from day 1 that would still be a great improvement from today!
Update, Sharon Graham, head of Unite, has released a statment criticising this. Important to note that Labour had met with unions before and promised not to water down worker rights reform any more after u-turning on a number of policies back in September. The main point of criticism is the number of caveats that accompany many of the proposals.
As a trade union official myself, I'd just like to say that that is some seriously good shit. It's practically a wishlist of all the things I feel would make my job of representing people in distress easier.
I know Unite are critical, but other unions are less so. I'd suggest that Unite's criticisms are more about the strength of the pledges (i.e. how committed Labour are to implementing this stuff quickly) rather than the content of what's being promised. While they could always go further, this is nonetheless a really solid set of reforms.
Why do people use the word "Tory" when criticising the Conservative Party? The word Tory won't appear on the ballot paper and has a meaning from another century and I'm sure most people don't get the reference.
The Conservative Party trashed the economy with Trussonimics.
The Conservative Party kept wages low.
The Conservative Party partied in breach of covid rules they had made, the night before the Queen followed them and mourned alone.
The Conservative Party loves austerity and making poor people pay for the financial mismanagement of the rich.
The Conservative Party doesn't have any good ideas that would make the country any better.
The Conservative Party ran the NHS into the ground long before covid and disbanded the epidemic preparatory unit shortly before covid struck.
The Conservative Party took the opportunity of the pandemic to suspend government procurement rules in favour of the VIP lane, where VIP literally meant friends of Conservative MPs or Conservative Party donors and wasted billions on equipment that didn't work, just so they could enrich their friends.
The Conservative Party will choose tax cuts for the wealthiest above investment in public services every day of the week, every week of the year, every year of the decade and every decade of the century and every century of their existence, because the purpose of the Conservative Party is to keep money and power with the rich and established and away from the poor and the working class.