AS THE shadow secretary of state for employment rights responsible for the production of the New Deal for Working People, I was overjoyed that what we’d all worked so hard on was adopted as Labour Party policy and has been heralded ever since as the cornerstone of the next Labour government’s transformative agenda.

So I was greatly interested in the deliberations around this policy area at our party’s National Policy Forum (NPF) in Nottingham a few weeks ago.

Whilst we await the final wording coming from the NPF, what do we know? 

The NPF makes clear that the New Deal firmly remains as policy going into the next election and with it the commitment to legislate to bring in its provision within 100 days of a Labour government.

There’s a great deal to welcome from the NPF deliberations:

- Tackling the scourge of fire and rehire. 

- Workers’ right to access to a union at work and the simplification of union recognition.

- Reversing the Tories’ attack on equal pay and the enacting of the socioeconomic duty under section 1 of the Equality Act.

- Establishing a Council for Economic Growth to include trade unions.

- Removing discriminatory age bands from the National Minimum Wage.

- Fair Pay Agreements that are needed across the economy, and Labour will start with carers.

I’d like to see greater detail around some issues including the commitment to bring in a better enforcement of workers’ rights and the abolition of zero-hours contracts.

The New Deal says we’ll “ban zero-hour contracts” but there the NPF says we’ll “ban exploitative zero-hour contracts.”

Zero-hour contracts are by definition exploitative, so I am unsure what the added word “exploitative” means. 

The intent of the New Deal was to banish them altogether and put an end to one-sided flexibility and provide for regularisation and protections within flexible working arrangements.

On statutory sick pay (SSP), we saw through the pandemic just how dangerous it was that sick workers, facing a drop in income to less than £100 per week, would carry on despite the obvious public health risks rather than face the prospect of being unable to feed their families. 

In many comparable jurisdictions SSP is at a rate equivalent to the National Living Wage. We should adopt the same approach.

I am delighted to see the removal of the lower earnings limit. It was always immoral and ridiculous that those who earned the least were not entitled to any SSP.

Much of the noise post the NPF has been around the established commitment to create a single status of “worker” so that, except for those who are genuinely self-employed with their own client base, there would be a singular status for workers regardless of “sector, wage, or contract type” who would be “afforded the same basic rights and protections.”

I am delighted to see the re-commitment to better protect the self-employed, but I have some worries about how we intend to further define our position on “single status.”

Working people are far too regularly trapped in bogus employment arrangements and despite their employer controlling every aspect of their working lives, they are falsely treated as being self-employed.

Those employers avoid their responsibilities, and their workers are left unprotected and without rights and again, far too regularly, the courts have to intervene to define the true nature of the relationship. 

We should put an end to such abuse and confusion so that people who go to work will be either workers with full employment protections and rights or genuinely self-employed with better protections. 

Security for those single status workers would be a game changer and simultaneously swell the coffers of the Treasury by billions of pounds every year with the receipt of new income tax and national insurance payments that are currently missing. It’s a win win.

Apparently, there is to be a “consultation” about single status and that has worried many people. 

But that consultation will seemingly be on the implementation of single status not on the principle itself. That is an important distinction and needs to be nailed down.

Similarly, we need to be clear about full employment rights on day one of employment.

That entitlement wouldn’t deny an employer the ability to dismiss someone on good grounds or put an end to probationary periods. That’s not what it’s about. But it would put an end to the numerous and conflicting qualifying periods for various employment rights making them all effective once the contract began and address the opportunities for abuse in the current system. 

It is anathema that the protection from being unfairly dismissed is only effective after two years of employment whereas at one year, 364 days there is no such protection.

There is much to welcome from the NPF but there are still areas that require clarification and I look forward to hearing more about that from our front bench in the weeks and months ahead.

I can hear my good friend Lord John Hendy KC agreeing with all of the above but stressing that the key to all of this is to reverse the decline in sectoral collective bargaining. And he’s right.

We do so by repealing the anti-trade union legislation and liberating our unions to best represent their members. In the 1980s over 80 per cent of the workforce benefited from collective bargaining. Now it’s nearer 20 per cent. Is it any wonder wages have stagnated so badly?

The New Deal can deliver a real transformation of the lives of millions of workers in our country. 

It gives Labour the opportunity to end in-work poverty and recalibrate our economy in favour of working people and to reverse the fragility and insecurity endured in so many British households. 

That has to be Labour’s mission.

Andy McDonald is MP for Middlesbrough and was shadow employment rights secretary from 2020-21.