Levelling up at work - fixing work to level up across the UK

Creating an economy based on decent work

A skills strategy for all workers

·       A significant boost to investment in learning and skills by both the state and employers is essential.

·       People should have access to fully-funded learning and skills entitlements and new workplace training rights throughout their lives, expanding opportunities for upskilling and retraining.

·       These entitlements should be incorporated into lifelong learning accounts and accompanied by new workplace rights, including a new right to paid time off for learning and training for all workers.

·       Opportunities for high-quality apprenticeships for young people must be expanded and the government should reform and enforce regulation on training, wages and employment standards to raise standards.

·       We need a national social partnership, bringing together employers, trade unions and government, to provide clear strategic direction on skills - as is the case in most other countries.

·       Our college workforce must be empowered and properly rewarded for their work; an immediate priority must be to tackle the long-term decline in pay in the sector.

·       The government should introduce a permanent short-time working scheme to protect jobs in times of crisis or transition, building on the lessons of the furlough scheme.

Corporate governance reform to promote long-term, sustainable growth

·       To address shareholder primacy, directors’ duties should be reformed so that directors are required to promote the long-term success of the company as their primary aim, taking account of the interests of stakeholders including the workforce, shareholders, local communities and suppliers and the impact of the company’s operations on human rights and on the environment.

·       Worker directors elected by the workforce should comprise one third of the board at all companies with 250 or more staff.

Giving workers a voice at work – strengthening workplace and sectoral bargaining

·       Unions should have access to workplaces to tell workers about the benefits of union membership and collective bargaining (following the system in place in New Zealand).

·       We need new rights to make it easier for working people to negotiate collectively with their employer, including simplifying the process that workers must follow to have their union recognised by their employer for collective bargaining and enabling unions to scale up bargaining rights in large, multi-site organisations.

·       The scope of collective bargaining rights should be expanded to include all pay and conditions, including pay and pensions, working time and holidays, equality issues (including maternity and paternity rights), health and safety, grievance and disciplinary processes, training and development, work organisation, including the introduction of new technologies, and the nature and level of staffing.

·       The government should establish new bodies for unions and employers to negotiate across sectors to set minimum standards and Fair Pay Agreements, starting with hospitality and social care.

An industrial strategy for good, green jobs

·       To bid for infrastructure contracts or energy subsidies auctions, companies should be required to demonstrate commitments to strong labour and human rights standards across their supply chain, and to lay out how they will strengthen local supply chains and what level of local content they expect to achieve. Companies should be held accountable for these commitments.

·        The local content target for offshore wind should be brought up to at least 80%.

·       The UK should make use of geographical exceptions to state aid rules (e.g. the successor to the EU Assisted Areas Map), and where appropriate, apply for sectoral treaty exceptions based on public interest, to strengthen local supply chain rules.

·       The UK should also use future international trade negotiations to expand governments’ ability to use conditions on investment to strengthen domestic supply chains.

·       The government should invest at scale in future-proofing industrial workplaces.

·       Where local economies depend on high carbon local employment that cannot be retooled, the UK should provide funding equivalent to the EU’s ‘Just Transition Fund’ to support communities to diversify and develop alternative industries.

Using trade policy to create high global standards

·       Trade deals and WTO rules should be used as a lever to lock in the highest standards by enforcing respect for international labour organisation (ILO) standards. Too often, rights have been defined disparagingly in trade deals as ‘non-tariff barriers’ that should be removed.

·       The government should not sign trade deals with countries that are abusing fundamental labour and human rights.

·       Trade deals must contain a mechanism for sanctions to be applied on countries and companies violating workers’ rights. Trade unions must be involved in this process to ensure action is taken when workers’ rights are abused.

·       Any freeports – zero tariff areas - that are established must not allow lower levels of workers’ rights in the freeport.

·       There must be a complete exemption for all public services in WTO rules and trade deals to ensure they don’t lock privatisation into public services that have already been part privatised.

·       Trade deals must also exclude the corporate court system (known as the Investor-State Dispute Settlement system) that allows multinational companies to sue governments for regulating public services that have been privatised in a way that threatens their profits.

·       In order to achieve the above goals, it is crucial that trade unions can comment on the text of trade negotiations and are involved in the development and monitoring of trade policy.

Government leading by example – public services, job creation and procurement

Good employment at the heart of strong and resilient public services

·       Government must end the cuts to public services and invest to reverse them, bringing investment back to the levels we need to maintain quality and meet demand. We need significant funding to clear the backlog in the NHS, provide much needed reforms in social care and increase funding in ‘unprotected’ areas like local government, criminal justice and transport that have suffered among the worst impacts of austerity.

·       The public sector pay freeze should be ended immediately. Public sector workers should be paid at least the real living wage and awarded pay rises that keep pace with the increased cost of living, while making up for lost earnings over the last decade.

·       Public ownership and in-house provision must be the default setting for public services, unless there a strong public interest case for putting services out to tender. 

·       During the process of bringing jobs back in-house, departments should be funded so that outsourced workers’ pay is increased to at least the Real Living Wage.

·       When services and jobs are outsourced, creating social value should be a core component of procurement strategy – including a stronger focus on promoting employment standards and good jobs.

·       All public service contractors should meet the ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’6 and have the structures and arrangements in place to support this.

·       A new public body should be set up, that operates at arm’s length from central government, with statutory powers to require both commissioners and contractors from across the public sector to supply it with data. This body should maintain a ‘Domesday Book’ of all contracts including their performance on the outsourcing of services.

The role of government in creating and supporting good, green quality jobs

·       The government should expand the infrastructure recovery, investing £85bn programme to create 1.24 million good quality green jobs.

·       The government should build job creation and job quality tests into public investment decision-making and procurement standards.

·       Olympics style agreements should be used to guarantee decent jobs in big infrastructure projects.

Strengthening the floor of employment protection for all workers

Employment rights

·       Ban zero hours contracts. This can be achieved by giving workers the right to a shift that reflects their normal hours of work, coupled with robust rules on notice of shifts and compensation for cancelled shifts.

·       All workers including agency workers, zero hours contract workers and casual workers, should be entitled to the same floor of rights currently enjoyed by employees. A new ‘worker’ definition should be devised that covers all existing employees and workers, including zero-hours contract workers, agency workers and dependent contractors. The definition should extend to individuals who are employed via an agency or a personal service company. Those covered by new ‘worker’ status should benefit from the full range of statutory rights. Care needs to be taken when devising new statutory definitions to ensure that working people are not disadvantaged, that those in need of protection are covered, and that a new test is resilient and will accommodate future developments in the labour market.

·       Allow workers to bring a claim for unpaid wages, holiday pay and sick pay against any contractor in the supply chain above them. The TUC wants joint liability laws extended so that workers can bring a claim for unpaid wages and holiday pay against any contractor in the supply chain above them. This would be similar to countries like Australia where Fair Work laws extend liability to franchisors like McDonalds.

·       We need an outright ban on umbrella companies by requiring employment agencies to pay and employ the staff they place with clients.

·       Levelling up requires decent wages. We need a minimum wage of at least £10 an hour to put more money into workers’ pockets and address in-work poverty. Wage growth for low-paid workers will contribute to economic recovery by boosting demand and consumer confidence. In the long-term, workers of all ages should receive the standard rate of the minimum wage. All workers, including young workers, should be eligible for the national living wage.

Tackling systemic inequalities

·       The government should create and publish a cross-departmental action plan, with clear targets and a timetable for delivery, setting out the steps that it will take to tackle the entrenched disadvantage and discrimination faced by BME people, with regular updates published and reported to parliament.

·       The government’s vision for disability equality should be built around the social model of disability and developed with the full involvement of disabled people. It should move away from the voluntarism of Disability Confident, to an approach based on mandatory requirements.

·       The Government Equalities Office should review and where necessary redraft the gender equality roadmap to reflect the current context and challenges working mums face, including a clear timetable for acting on the findings.

·       The government should strengthen the gender pay gap reporting requirements, and introduce ethnic and disability pay gap reporting.

·       Pay gap reporting measures should require employers to publish actions plans on what they are doing to close the pay gaps they have reported.

o   Action plans should cover recruitment, retention, promotion, pay and grading, access to training, performance management and discipline and grievance procedures relating to staff and applicants. It is vital that intersectional issues – for example, those affecting disabled women – are acknowledged and addressed.

·       The government must comply with its existing public sector equality duty (PSED) and proactively consider equality impacts at each stage of any policy-making process with a view to promoting equality and eliminating discrimination. Doing this retrospectively, to assess the extent of damage that has been done or provide justification for a particular approach, is not acceptable. Equality impact assessments, although not a specific requirement, are tangible evidence of meaningful engagement with the PSED and as such should be published and impacts monitored on an ongoing basis.

·       The government must help working families balance paid work and childcare, by reforming the system of parental leave and access to flexible working. This must include:

o   Ten days' paid carers’ leave, from day one in a job, for all parents. Currently parents have no statutory right to paid leave to look after their children and current proposals for unpaid leave will make taking leave unaffordable for many families.

o   Reform of parental leave to include an individual, non-transferable right for each parent on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis.

o   Invest in childcare to ensure that good quality, affordable childcare is available to working parents and help the sector recover from the impact of the pandemic.

o   Making flexible working the default for all workers, through a legal duty on employers to publish in job advertisements which flexible working arrangements are available in a role and a day one right to request flexible working for all workers. Workers should have a right to appeal and no restrictions on the number of flexible working requests made. If an employer does not think that any flexible working arrangements are possible, they should be required to set out the exceptional circumstances that justify this decision.

·       The Equality and Human Rights Commission or EHRC should receive additional, ringfenced resources so that they can use their unique enforcement powers as equality regulator to effectively identify and tackle breaches of the Equality Act in the workplace.

o   This must include targeted enforcement of workers’ right to reasonable adjustments and developing practical guidance for employers to increase their understanding and confidence in using the positive action provisions permitted in the Equality Act to address under-representation of disabled people.

Beyond the workplace – strengthening our safety net

Pensions and older workers

·       The government should shelve scheduled increases to the SPA to prevent the gap between healthy life expectancy and SPA in many parts of the country widening.

·       Ahead of the next planned SPA review in July 2023, the government should establish a cross-party commission to examine options including varying the state pension age to take account of differences in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy and giving people increased flexibility over when and how they access their state pension.

·       To raise living standards among poorer pensioners across the country and support local economies, the government must maintain the triple lock, at least until the UK state pension reaches the level of comparable countries, and reinstate the earnings link for the 2022 uprating.

Universal credit

·       The cut in Universal Credit must be reversed, and Universal Credit should be increased to at least 80 per cent of the level of the living wage, around £260 a week.

Sick pay for all

·       We need to reform our statutory sick pay system, removing the lower earnings limit and raising payment levels to the Real Living Wage.