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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We must force their hand with a workers’ bill of rights
The government is openly committed to meeting the social and financial crisis with attacks on working people rather than reform. That is why we must now launch our own programme, write KEITH EWING and LORD JOHN HENDY KC
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?
RISING food, energy and housing costs and the falling value of wages mean that workers’ living standards are under attack. So are their legal rights. The government refuses to introduce an Employment Bill, promised in 2019, and is currently on course to remove a large body of workers’ rights derived from EU law, including the right to paid holidays.
The government is also attacking trade union rights, with further restrictions designed to undermine the ability of workers to fight back. Yet British workers are already among the least protected in the developed world, and British employers are among the most powerful.
British workplaces have been plagued for years by zero-hours or work-on-demand contracts, flexible contractual terms giving wide-ranging powers to managers to dictate when, where and how work is to be done, fire-and-rehire allowing employers to reduce pay and working conditions, and, at P&O Ferries, the emergence of fire-and-replace as a corporate tactic.
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The unions are unhappy with the Employment Rights Act 2025 and with good reason. KEITH EWING and Lord JOHN HENDY KC take a close look at why the Bill promised more than it delivered
Labour’s watered-down legislation won’t protect us from unfair dismissal or ban some zero-hours contracts until 2027 — leaving millions of young people vulnerable to the populist right’s appeal, warns TUC young workers chair FRASER MCGUIRE
The Bill addresses some exploitation but leaves trade unions heavily regulated, most workers without collective bargaining coverage, and fails to tackle the balance of power that enables constant mutation of bad practice, write KEITH EWING and LORD JOHN HENDY KC
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR