SOLOMON HUGHES says even electoral defeat isn’t a deterrent to right-wing MPs: pro-corporate policies might lose elections but they can be lucrative nonetheless
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Labour’s plan to make work pay
Professor Keith Ewing and Lord John Hendy KC examine the new deal for workers outlined in the King's Speech and what should follow it
LABOUR'S TO DO LIST: Sort out strike rights and collectice bargaining
Schools are at breaking point, argues NASUWT general secretary MATT WRACK — we urgently need investment in our kids’ futures
MIKE SCOTT assesses the AI threat to jobs in the first of a pair of articles on the problems it poses
Without energy and without a strategic partner, Cuba is currently fighting for its survival. While the population is literally sitting in the dark, the Trump administration is trying to definitively break the socialist project through economic blackmail. What lies ahead for the island, asks MARC VANDEPITTE
A setback for IG Metall at Tesla’s Berlin plant has ignited claims of intimidation and raised fears for the future of collective bargaining and workplace democracy, says TONY BURKE
The question for the media, in the US and across the globe, says ROGER McKENZIE, is will they do their job fearlessly and call Donald Trump out?
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THE new government is to be congratulated for the commitment in the King’s Speech that it will honour its manifesto commitment to implement the proposals made in Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay, the latest version of its New Deal for Working People.
The government’s proposals include major changes: employment rights from day one, doing away with zero-hours contracts, banning “fire and rehire,” easing the conditions for statutory sick pay, allowing workers to take carers’ leave and bereavement leave, ensuring workers have the right to switch off, extending full employment rights to all workers other than those truly in business on their own account, and much else besides.
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But although most welcome, even if fully implemented these changes to individual rights will not address the real problem faced by the overwhelming majority of our 31 million working people. That problem is lack of power at the workplace, with the vast majority of workers having no control over — indeed, no input into — the terms and conditions on which they work.
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