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Editorial: Workers' rights U-turn shows the Tories are weaker than they seem

KWASI KWARTENG has changed his tune. The Business Secretary says he “can’t have been more clear” that Brexit is an opportunity to raise standards on workers’ rights, not attack them.

But Kwarteng’s statement cannot hide the U-turn that has taken place. “The review is no longer happening,” he admitted to ITV’s Peston when challenged over plans to drop the 48-hour maximum working week and attack holiday pay entitlement.

Kwarteng, as Labour MP Richard Burgon pointed out in the Morning Star this week, is among the authors of Britannia Unchained, a 2012 Thatcherite screed that called for wide-ranging attacks on employment law while sniffing that British workers are among “the worst idlers in the world.”

His presence, along with that of the book’s co-authors Dominic Raab, Priti Patel and Liz Truss, in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet has been taken as evidence that the most extreme ideologists of the Tory right were now in the driving seat.

Yet when his magnum opus was mentioned at the business, energy and industrial strategy committee in Parliament last week, he mumbled that all this was “a long time ago.”

What’s changed? The sudden retreat echoes many Tory U-turns by this chaotic administration. 

Like them, it points to serious weaknesses at the heart of government despite the apparent invincibility of a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority — and to divisions in the ruling class itself.

The proposed attacks on the working-time directive and holiday pay met immediate opposition across the trade union movement and from the Labour Party. 

The Tories’ nervousness when confronted with a united parliamentary and industrial opposition is a lesson in itself, and should encourage unions to press the Labour Party for much tougher challenges to the government across the board.

Real concessions could be wrung from it on issues from statutory sick pay to the proposed cuts to universal credit if Labour dropped its default position of supporting ministers’ handling of the coronavirus crisis.

But even business chiefs were left cold by the proposed overhaul, with the Financial Times coming out strongly against it shortly after breaking the story.

Part of the reason lies in the extraordinary weakness of labour rights in Britain already. Britain opted out of the 48-hour maximum working week in the working-time directive anyway.

A huge gig economy in which millions are trapped on insecure contracts with no sick or holiday pay rights anyway has eroded what formal rights continue to exist.

For the many forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, the 48-hour maximum was a dead letter.

Britain’s capitalists are already in a position to super-exploit workers — as the current furore over fire-and-rehire demonstrates. 

Given the deep economic shocks caused by the pandemic, which follow five years of extreme political turbulence due to the Brexit vote and the rise of a serious socialist challenge to the system under Jeremy Corbyn, most are wary of provocative moves that could unite larger numbers of workers behind organised labour — especially as unions in key sectors have recruited strongly during the pandemic.

None of this means that the threat to workers’ rights from the Tories is illusory. The warnings that they intended to come for our rights have been vindicated.

But the fragility of the political and economic status quo makes them jumpy, even if the socialist challenge appears to have subsided for the time in Britain and the US. 

Unite leader Len McCluskey’s immediate call for a ban on fire-and-rehire is precisely the right response to the Tory retreat. Not only is a new deal for workers desperately needed, the best defence against attacks on our rights is not to plead for a truce while the pandemic continues to rage, but to demand better. We are in a position to make gains.

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