The Conservatives are failing working people: incomes and living standards are falling as bills skyrocket amidst a cost-of-living crisis. Now, they’ve also crashed the economy leaving working people with higher prices and mortgage rates, longer hours and weaker working rights.
Our country needs a Government that is on our side and, with Labour’s New Deal for Working People, we would make work more secure, better-paid and more family friendly, as well as strengthening individual and collective rights at work and ending unscrupulous practices like fire and rehire and banning zero hour contracts.
Today, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) lead a campaign lobbying MPs in Westminster as part of their #DemandBetter campaign. As part of this mass lobby, I met with Luton South constituents representing the National Education Union (NEU) and, along with Sarah Owen MP and Mohammad Yasin MP, a delegation of Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) representatives from the Eastern region, including Paul Moffat, Regional Secretary.
Labour’s New Deal for Working People would address the TUC’s main campaign aims with a commitment to ensure that the minimum wage is fair and enforced properly, the recruitment and retention crisis in our public services is addressed with fair pay offers and an end to precarious work practises such as fire and rehire and zero hours contracts with no minimum hours. We unequivocally support workers’ right to strike and defend jobs and pay and would strengthen the Trade Union Act as well as developing our own Race Equality Act to tackle structural inequalities in the workplace and address gender inequalities by protecting maternity rights in the workplace. In the wake of the economic crisis made in Downing Street, the Tories have been considering targeting the most vulnerable people to pay for their mess through benefit and real term pension cuts. This is appalling and the country deserves so much better which is why we support calls for a General Election now.
The British public deserves more than the revolving door of chaos that this Government has given us. A General Election is needed to give the country an opportunity to vote for policies like these for empowered individual and collective rights at work and a high-growth, high-wage economy for all.