UNIONS have overwhelmingly welcomed Labour’s first King’s Speech.
The labour movement has not got everything it wanted from the new deal for workers. But there is a clear shift in favour of workplace rights: and it is refreshing to hear the phrase “make work pay” used for a plan to do that, rather than, as on the lips of successive Tory ministers, as a euphemism for attacking social security for those out of or unable to work.
Sick pay, parental leave and protection from unfair dismissal applying from day one matter. Giving all employees the right to a contract reflecting the number of hours they regularly work will make it much harder for bad bosses to use zero-hours contracts to rule through fear, cutting shifts when workers raise safety or other issues or seek to organise: and providing security from sudden fluctuations in income.
No less important are the promised repeal of anti-union laws and modernisation of strike legislation, including long overdue provision for electronic balloting.
Here, as with the establishment of collective bargaining structures for social care and school support staff, Labour’s commitments must be viewed as a base to build on: briefing notes for the Employment Rights Bill name Tory minimum service levels as legislation to be repealed, but are silent on ballot thresholds, so the detail of the Bill will be important. Similarly, it is a failing that collective bargaining is to be limited to two sectors, and the promised consultation on extending it is one unions will need to enforce.
There are other positives which, much like collective bargaining, are restricted to one or two sectors, but remain real steps forward.
On the railways there is a clear path to public ownership as well as to bring in a unified track and train structure. Intentions are important, and promises to simplify the currently bewildering ticket pricing structure and to set rising passenger numbers as a goal are welcome.
No less important is the Better Buses Bill, which will allow local government to take services back in house: a chance at last to halt, and start to reverse, the devastating decline in the bus network’s extent and frequency of services since these community lifelines were privatised. This in turn ties to new powers for nations and regions: though proper constitutional reform has been ducked, abolition of hereditary peers leaving us with an unelected House of Lords stocked with dodgy donors and electoral rejects.
There remain serious problems in Labour’s approach. Privatisation and fragmentation have wrought havoc in other sectors, not least the NHS, whose supply chain is a profiteers’ gravy train and whose growing reliance on private provision is costly and self-defeating: yet Labour wants more of the same.
If the “private good, public bad” assumption of the last 40 years is now challenged, there is still no understanding that essential services must be publicly owned and democratically accountable: something which urgently needs applying to the energy and water sectors.
On this prospectus, Keir Starmer’s Labour is both better and worse than Tony Blair’s. Better, because unlike Blair’s it is prepared to loosen the shackles on organised labour, making it easier to build power in the workplace.
Worse, because it does not promise the increased investment in services and pay rises that Blair’s government did. Yet the share of national product paid in wages has shrunk for 50 years as that taken in profits and rents has risen; while across the public sector the need for investment is obvious.
Ministers blame the economic outlook. Yet the profits accumulated by energy barons, the big banks and by the monopolies controlling our food and water supplies are greater than ever.
Fixing broken Britain is impossible without redistribution, reducing these record profits to pay working-class people their actual and their social wage. Labour shies away from that reality: will we?
