LABOUR’S “work manifesto” launched yesterday sets out clear dividing lines between the party and the Conservatives.

Pledges include abolishing the employment tribunal fees introduced by the Con-Dems, legislation against using agency workers to undercut the terms and conditions of other staff and action to halt the explosion of zero-hours contracts.

Such measures would certainly reverse some of the most vicious anti-working class measures implemented in the name of austerity, so trade union leaders were right to welcome them.

Combined with an inquiry into blacklisting and the release of all papers relating to the Shrewsbury Pickets, there are now even more obvious reasons for socialists to work for the return of Labour as the only party that can actually remove David Cameron and his crooked cronies from Downing Street.

As Ed Miliband said yesterday, millions of workers are “left at the beck and call of an employer who can ask the world of you but gives you no security in return.”

The right to a proper contract after 12 weeks falls short of the drastic action needed to eradicate these exploitative contracts, of course. The Labour leader argues that “legal mechanisms” will stop employers “gaming the system” by dropping employees after 11 weeks, but offered little detail.

The final shape of an employment tribunal system remains unclear, although it is welcome that the TUC has been promised a role in shaping it — even if that place is alongside the Confederation of British Industry.

But that was one of the few acknowledgements in Labour’s plan that trade unions must be at the heart of any strategy to empower Britain’s workers.

As the Scottish TUC’s Grahame Smith says: “Ultimately, workers must be empowered to bargain for themselves in the workplace through recognised trade unions.

“We will continue to press the case for the introduction of freedoms enjoyed by most workers in the developed world to union representation and decency and dignity at work.”

The labour movement fought hard for the introduction of the minimum wage by the last Labour government, which took place amid the usual dire Tory predictions that it would cause widespread job losses.

And it will need to keep fighting to shame employers who pay poverty wages and to press Labour to ensure its “more than £8 an hour by 2020” minimum wage promise means significantly more than that feeble target.

Introducing a legal minimum helped reduce super-exploitation, particularly of women, ethnic minorities and other swathes of the population who are so often paid less than their colleagues.

But it is just that — a minimum. Workers will never be able to rely on a capitalist state, whether run by the Labour Party or not, to defend or advance their rights.

What rights we have, we won in the teeth of bitter opposition from the ruling class. Even the pioneering achievements of the 1945-51 Labour government would have been inconceivable had there not been a powerful trade union movement holding that administration to account.

So Labour’s continued failure to pledge the repeal of Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws undermines its claim to stand for working people and hobbles our fightback.

To realise the pay rises necessary to start clawing back some of the wealth we create, we need a resurgence of collective and sectoral bargaining.

Mr Smith welcomed “hints” of such an approach from Labour, but they remain mere hints.

Our immediate priority is the defeat of the Con-Dem government and the labour movement is rightly mobilising for this. But whatever the result on May 7, the campaign to free our trade unions has to be taken up by all who claim to speak for the working class.