One of the key achievements of this Labour government has been the Employment Rights Act (ERA), which will… The post Paul Nowak column: ‘It’s time for Labour to shout about workers’ rights from the rooftops’ appeared first on LabourList.
One of the key achievements of this Labour government has been the Employment Rights Act (ERA), which will help make work pay and deliver security at work for millions.
Yet after a disastrous set of local election results, the same old predictable voices are coming out of the woodwork to make opportunistic and bad faith calls for the ERA to be watered down.
Over the past week we’ve seen Next boss and Tory Peer Lord Wolfson and Tony Blair make headlines by railing against it.
Make no mistake: both Blair and Wolfson are defending a broken status quo which has seen insecure work explode, living standards squeezed and working poverty rates soar.
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Those happy with this broken status quo are out of touch. They don’t have to deal with the lived reality of insecure employment, not knowing from one week to the next what will be in your pay packet.
Let’s take the issue which Lord Wolfson has homed in on: guaranteed hours.
Millions of workers up and down the country are on a variable or zero hours contracts.
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That leaves them at the whim of a bad employer who can take away their hours at the drop of a hat. No hours. No pay. No security.
How are working parents supposed to balance that with the unpredictability of childcare? It’s near impossible.
This failed approach has left millions without security, not knowing how much they’ll be earning from week to week.
That isn’t just bad for workers – it’s bad for our economy too. Less money in workers’ pockets means less spent on our high streets.
But it also feeds into a sense of despair in this country which is poisoning our politics.
A poll conducted for the TUC after the local election found that nearly half the country think that you cannot get ahead no matter how hard you work – and fewer than one fifth think their personal finances are getting better.
We need to turn that around. And the foundation must be making sure we end the scourge of insecure work for good.
That’s why unions, leading women’s and child poverty campaigners and academics have come together to call on the government to stick to its guns on delivering new rights to secure contracts.
It’s essential that all workers benefit and that agency workers are included too.
The reality is that voters up and down the country emphatically support the government’s workers’ rights agenda. Seven in ten want the government to deliver guaranteed hours – including most Tory and Reform voters.
The problem? Barely any of them knew Labour is delivering these policies.
Too often the government has acted like it’s embarrassed of this agenda, refusing the chance to pick fights with bad bosses for fear of criticism from Big Business.
This needs to stop. Ministers need to ignore the noise and crack on with delivering security at work for all. It’s time to shout from the rooftops and show working people this government is on their side.
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The post Paul Nowak column: ‘It’s time for Labour to shout about workers’ rights from the rooftops’ appeared first on LabourList.
