First week back in Parliament and a handful Tories took to the airwaves, shell shocked staggering into TV studios to turn the clock back to the late 1990s predicting job losses, company failures and the end of the world as Labour begins the implementation process of the New Deal For Workers.
Interviewers brushed aside their limp arguments and can now point to a new TUC poll of 3,000 voters showing huge backing across the political spectrum for improving protections at work and for the fundamental policies that underpin Labour’s New Deal for working people.
The polling reveals what voters thought about Labour’s key employment right policies:
- Implementing a real living wage: Three-quarters (77%) of 2024 voters support Labour’s commitment to ensure that the national minimum wage rises to be a real living wage.
- Strengthening unfair dismissal: Nearly 2 in 3 (64%) of all 2024 election voters support the day one right to protection from unfair dismissal.
- Making sick pay a day 1 right: Nearly 7 in 10 voters (69%) back Labour’s plan to make statutory sick pay available from the first day of sickness.
- Ban on fire and rehire: Two-thirds (66%) of voters support a ban on fire and rehire.
- Ban on zero hours contracts: Nearly 7 in 10 (67%) voters support banning zero-hours contracts by offering all workers a contract that reflects their normal hours of work and compensation for cancelled shifts.
And there is majority support for collective rights too, including:
- Union access to workplaces: 2024 voters by a margin over two to one (46% in favour, 19% against) support giving trade unions a right to access workplaces to tell workers about the benefits of joining a trade union.
- Voters across the political spectrum want work to pay and to feel secure and respected in their jobs. Labour’s workers’ rights plans are hugely popular, and this poll should give ministers confidence to get on with delivering them in full.
- Working people want a government that is on their side and that will improve the quality of work in this country. After 14 years of stagnating living standards, the UK needs to turn the page on our low-rights, low-pay economy that has allowed good employers to be undercut by the bad.