THE TUC is right to warn that weak law enforcement will hobble efforts to stop companies like P&O Ferries flouting minimum wage laws.

The trade union federation’s call for HM Revenue & Customs inspectors to be given the right to board and inspect ships clearly merits support, but the minimum wage is barely enforced even on-shore, partly because HMRC’s own capacity has taken a battering through massive job cuts for a decade. 

An OpenDemocracy investigation last year found that despite tax authorities finding 6,500 minimum wage violations in the past six years, just six employers were prosecuted. 

On the rare occasions when the government feels it has to make a show of caring about illegal poverty pay, it indulges in stunts like “naming and shaming” employers. 

This is hardly likely to bother bosses who are completely shameless like Peter Hebblethwaite, who calmly admits to MPs that P&O broke the law deliberately when it sacked 800 of its staff and would do it again.

The indifference with which the British state treats violations of the law by employers has been contrasted to the viciousness with which it polices the activity of trade unions since the P&O sackings shocked the nation.

There is no sign whatever that Grant Shapps’s “nine-point plan” to deal with the P&O crisis indicates a shift in Tory attitudes on this subject. 

The most draconian anti-trade union laws in Europe remain in place. 

As the Institute of Employment Rights president Professor Keith Ewing has pointed out, revoking Thatcher-era legislation removing legal protection from enforcement action by unions in dispute with employers, as well as the ban on solidarity action, would allow port workers to boycott vessels whose crews were denied the agreed rate, in the way workers in some European countries are already boycotting P&O.

The government is not considering any relaxation of anti-trade union rules, and indeed is pursuing legislation which will further restrict union activity. 

The Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill empowers police to shut down public gatherings if the “noise generated” could cause “serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried on in the vicinity.” 

This is, as Lord John Hendy QC has argued, a prescription for police interference with the right to picket — the very purpose of which is to cause “disruption to the activities” of the employer.

Shapps is not proposing to liberate unions to enforce standards for a very obvious reason. Unlike the state, they would do it.

A minimum wage decided by the state or agreed between states will be evaded by employers where they think they can get away with it, but is far less serious a challenge to bosses’ determination to dictate pay, terms and conditions to staff than collectively agreed rates for the job would be — and is likely to be far lower; even if P&O is forced to pay the minimum wage that is still a pay cut compared to what its sacked staff were earning.

The left’s focus should be on rebuilding union strength to set the rate for the job, with projects like Unite’s new sectoral combines at the forefront and co-operation between unions to get agreed rates across sectors. 

And we should not be afraid to challenge the Tories over the gulf between their promise that Brexit was about “taking back control” and their refusal to protect workers from undercutting on wages in the name of a globalised market. With looming local elections, Conservative MPs and councillors can be put on the spot over this across the country.

The new deal for workers that the TUC plans to take to towns and cities nationwide this year is not merely about pay but about power — securing workers’ right to a say over the terms on which they work. 

Without that, no minister’s promise will stop the race to the bottom.