It’s tough for working people and their families at the moment. The price of everything is increasing – from fuel to energy bills to the weekly shop – but incomes are not keeping up.
The Tories promised a high-wage economy, but the brutal reality is they’ve overseen more than a decade of falling and flatlining pay, while work has become increasingly insecure. The Tories have broken Britain, and we’re all paying the price.
The contrast couldn’t be clearer.
Labour’s New Deal for Working People is a plan to make Britain work for working people.
Drawn up in partnership with Labour’s affiliated trade unions, it’s a comprehensive plan to improve the lives of working people by strengthening individual and collective rights – raising wages and improving working conditions.
Labour will write this plan into law within 100 days of taking office.
Labour will strengthen rights at work for all workers, from day one on the job, and ensure all workers are be entitled to basic rights and protections like sick pay, holiday pay, parental leave, flexible working and protection against unfair dismissal. They’ll remove the qualifying period for basic rights at work – so everyone is protected from their first day on the job. They will strengthen workplace rights and protections for those who are self-employed.
Labour will end fire and rehire so workers can be safe in the knowledge that terms and conditions negotiated in good faith can’t be ripped up under threat of dismissal.
Labour will make work more family-friendly, and make it easier to balance work with home, community and family life. Labour is committed to achieving a better work-life balance for all workers. They’ll review and improve maternity and paternity leave and the shared parental leave system and they’ll guarantee paid family and carers’ leave. Labour will make flexible working – including remote and hybrid working as well as flexi-hours, term-time hours and family friendly hours – a day one right for all workers by default. They’ll also bring in a new ‘right to switch off’ outside of working hours.
Labour will ban zero-hours contracts and ensure everyone has the right to regular hours they can rely on. All workers will have the right to a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, reasonable notice of any changes in shifts and fair compensation for cancelled and curtailed shifts.
Labour will strengthen trade union rights, raising pay and conditions. We know that unionised workplaces are more likely to provide decent pay, good training, and benefits, such as holiday and sick pay, above the statutory minimum. That’s why Labour will repeal the Trade Union Act and the new anti-strike laws, and why they’ll also update trade union legislation, to make it fit for the modern realities of work and remove unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity. They’ll introduce new rights to help unions recruit, organise and win a better deal for their members. This includes simplifying the process of union recognition, establishing a reasonable right of entry to organise in workplaces, new and strengthened protections for trade union reps and officials, including safeguards against blacklisting, and new rights for union Equality Reps.
Labour will reverse the decades-long decline in collective bargaining, using Fair Pay Agreements to drive up pay and conditions. Labour believes strong collective bargaining rights and institutions are key to tackling problems of insecurity, inequality, discrimination, enforcement and low pay. Labour will begin in adult social care, introducing a new Fair Pay Agreement that is negotiated through sectoral collective bargaining, to empower workers, the trade unions that represent them, and their employers to agree fair pay and conditions for all care workers. Labour will also assess how Fair Pay Agreements could benefit other sectors of the economy, and are committed to strengthening the rights of working people by empowering workers to organise collectively through trade unions.
Trade unions were founded to fight for working people, and unions are organising and winning a better deal for workers every single day.
We need a Government that will deliver for workers too – enshrining the rights that individual workers should be able to rely on, giving unions new rights to help them organise and win for their members, and putting power back into the hands of working people.
Working people need better rights, stronger unions and a Labour Government to win the new deal at work they deserve. ✊