NAMING and shaming 25 employers who have been caught out paying staff less than the minimum wage is certainly a positive step.

And news that many of these employers will now be fined for this breach of the law is also welcome, although a total fine of around £21,000 spread between 25 offenders suggests that the “crooks,” as TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady so aptly terms them, are getting off lightly.

But keynote new report How Unions Can Make Work Pay, produced by the GMB union and the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class), shows that winning secure, properly paid jobs for the many will take more than an occasional slap on the wrist for a handful of bad employers.

Whatever Tory toffs like George Osborne say about economic “recovery,” everyone knows that wages have failed to keep up with the soaring costs of basics such as food, transport, fuel and housing since the bankers crashed the economy in 2008.

Class and GMB warn that inequality in Britain has now returned to pre-first world war levels. 

It’s a grim way for our country to mark the centenary of that conflict.

And it’s a stark illustration of how far the neoliberal bid to rob working people of the rights we won in the 20th century has succeeded.

Attacks on our cherished public services such as the NHS, founded by a Labour government that was unashamed of its trade union origins, are part of this picture.

But so is the way increasing numbers of workers are deprived of the right to sick pay and holiday pay through bogus self-employment — over 40 per cent of new jobs created since 2010 are supposedly “self-employed” — and the surge in zero-hours contracts, which now trap at least 1.4 million people in insecure work.

The minimum wage is too low, a problem the government “solves” by subsidising bad employers through various benefits. So our taxes go to help companies avoid paying a living wage.

The living wage itself, officially £7.65 an hour or £8.80 an hour in London, is increasingly not enough to live on.

As GMB and Class explain, we need a serious boost to the minimum wage to at least the level of the current living wage, while they calculate that a living wage of at least £10 an hour is needed to allow a single person to live without relying on benefits.

Whatever rights we won in the past were won by working people fighting together through their trade unions. Britain needs a pay rise and neither the Tories nor Labour will give us one of their own accord.

The labour movement needs to take the fight to them.

Academies row

ENTERTAINING as it is to watch two Tory ministers at each others’ throats, the current row between Home Secretary Theresa May and Education Secretary Michael Gove has a sinister aspect.

Mr Gove is expected to place five Birmingham schools in “special measures” today due to allegations of extreme Islamists trying to take them over.

The detail has so far mostly consisted of Islamophobic Daily Mail headlines, and none of the more lurid accusations — anti-Christian chanting at assemblies and the like — has been substantiated.

All the schools so far named are academies, however. Perhaps Mr Gove should take another look at the advantages of schools being democratically accountable to their local authority.

And if he worries about inappropriate religious content at assembly, perhaps a commitment to universal secular education, provided by the state, might solve his problems.