Three Years On From The P&O Sackings
There is still an opportunity to to strengthen the Employment Rights Bill
Please pass this model motion in your Union, Union Region or District, Union Conference, Union Branch or Workplace, Trade Union Council, Labour Party CLP, etc.
Winning A New Deal For Working People
Labour’s renamed New Deal (Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay) does not address the fundamental power imbalance between workers and employers in UK law including the absence of a legal right to strike, the ban on the right to take sympathy action criticised by the ILO in its 2023 report on the P&O Ferries scandal, and the ban on so-called political strikes introduced by Tory governments in the 1980s. We deplore Labour’s failure to reinstate workplace ballots.
We further note that key elements of the New Deal for Working People have been dropped from Labour’s ERB, such as the introduction of sectoral collective bargaining across the economy through Fair Pay Agreements other than for school support staff in England and adult social care workers, with the caveats that these will not be collective agreements “as normally understood”.
We condemn those Labour MPs, donors and business interests who lobby Labour ministers and officials for the New Deal to be limited and scaled back. We believe the New Deal and Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay must be a beginning, not the end of a process of rebuilding workers’ collective rights in Britain.