THE cost-of-living crisis and the grotesque inequality of wealth in our society are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deep disparities of class and power.

Big businesses, the City and the super-rich wield huge economic and political power.

And working people and small businesses who have carved out a stake in society are seeing that diminish through wage suppression and bumper profits for the super-rich.

This extraction of wealth from the poor to the rich has been coupled with attacks on our ability as workers to improve our conditions through collective bargaining.

As of now, collective bargaining only covers a small percentage of the workforce.

A direct consequence of this is the proliferation of precarious contracts which now characterise employment in much of the economy.

The scourge of outsourcing destroys jobs, holds down pay and locks people out of pension provision. All of this makes union organising harder.

This helps to explain why, since the late ’70s, the share of national income taken by profits has risen, while that taken by labour has been driven down below 50 per cent.

With each crisis, from the great financial crash of 2008 to Covid, we’ve seen these big businesses grab more power and wealth.

For energy and logistics firms, the disruptions of Covid and the war in Ukraine have been an opportunity for price gouging, further aggravated by the greed of speculators.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, these are the main causes of the global inflation surge, whatever the Tories or the Bank of England say to the contrary.

For the handful of rail monopolies who control our passenger services, Covid disruption to travel patterns has been an opportunity to push an agenda of attacking my members’ pay and conditions that they’ve been pursuing since privatisation. For P&O, a year ago this Friday, it was an opportunity to fire and replace an entire workforce.

For these big businesses, every crisis is an opportunity. For working people it spells disaster.

The Tory government’s response to this vast power inequality has been to turn the force of the state against working people.

We’ve had years of austerity-justified incomes policies, aimed at driving the value of wages down, bringing in new waves of labour market deregulation.

Every time working people have responded through their unions, government power has been used to tighten a legal vice around the right to strike.

Today that right to strike is being removed for millions of workers, attacking the most basic democratic freedoms in our country.

That’s what makes it so important that at the very least, an incoming Labour government implements the New Deal for Working People and repeals these tyrannical anti-union laws.

We need the legal freedom and legal support to rebalance the rigged economy in Britain.

If we have the freedom to organise, to negotiate and collectively bargain, we can reach agreements with employers more quickly and stop this race to the bottom, raise incomes, stop the profiteering and encourage investment that can raise productivity without simply scrapping jobs.

We also need government support to end the scourge of outsourcing.

In public services, outsourcing is part of a failed dogma that aims to increase corporate profits, exploiting workers and driving down their pay and conditions on the assumption that it has no impact on service delivery.

It’s been a shameful driver of inequality in society, locking women, BAME and migrant workers into low-paid occupations.

The pandemic exposed this as a myth and the majority the public now rightly regard cleaners and facilities management staff as key to a functioning society.

Suddenly, cleaners and other outsourced workers were key workers, expected to keep going to work and put their lived on the line while others were able to work from home.

Outsourcing is a stain on our labour market and an injustice we must end.

Here again, Labour’s New Deal for Working People is vital. It says that the party will “oversee the biggest wave of insourcing of public services for a generation.”

But trade unions can’t simply sit back and wait for any future Labour government to deliver a New Deal.

We have to build an irresistible force now within our workplaces and communities to put the pressure on the politicians to deliver.  

In Wales, we’ve seen Labour take the decision to bring outsourced rail cleaners and caterers in-house, to form part of a publicly owned passenger rail service.

Across Britain, Labour councils are in-sourcing cleaning services, leisure services and more, working with unions to rebuild public-sector employment.

In London, Labour’s mayor has a huge opportunity to show exactly that kind of leadership on a big scale.

Transport for London has more than 2,000 outsourced cleaners, mainly working on the Underground and employed by a US company called ABM.

Last year ABM’s British subsidiary made profits of more than £9 million and most of that would have been from its contract with TfL.

These cleaners are predominantly BAME and migrant workers, many from eastern Europe. They have no sick pay from their company. They have no decent pension scheme.

And the company has cut the number of staff on the contract since 2017, leaving the ones who remain working harder for the same pay. RMT has been campaigning for years now to persuade the mayor to do what he knows is right and bring these cleaners in-house.

Last September, the mayor made a big move in the right direction by giving them access to a TfL travel pass, levelling out one key inequality in their treatment. Last month he extended this to other outsourced cleaners in TfL.

Crucially, he also committed to review the Tube cleaning contract to see if it could be insourced in April this year.

This is a big chance for the mayor.

We know that TfL has been under the cosh from the government but so is every authority, every council, every devolved government.

Where there is the will to work with us, we will find a way forward.

If Sadiq Khan gets this right, it will help show that Labour is on the side of working people and, in that way, help Labour win the next election.