In the UK, there are now 3.7 million people who have unsafe working conditions, the TUC (Trades Union Congress) shows in a new report.
From Romy Rohmann
In October 2016, the Government commissioned RSA chief Matthew Taylor to conduct an independent review of the UK framework around employee and worker rights in UK employment law. July 2017 saw a report on working life in the UK: Good Work, Taylor’s Review of Modern Work Practice.
This report describes changes in work life and shows possible steps to improve current laws and regulations so that they are more compatible with today’s work life. The government supported 51 of the 53 recommendations and presented a work plan for this. While the government has made many promises to implement some of these measures, including amending labor laws, little has been done. Now 5 years have passed and surveys show that the government is only tightening the rights of workers.
Presidential candidate Liz Truss has now also proposed to make effective trade union activity illegal in the UK and to strip workers of basic democratic rights such as strikes. We’ve written about this before on Steigan.no:
The TUC (Congress of Trade Unions), which represents more than 5.5 million workers belonging to the 48 unions, has written a report 5 years based on analysis from the Labor Force Survey, shows that 3.7 million workers in the UK have “unsafe working conditions”. It makes up about one in nine of the total workforce.
TUC defines unsafe working conditions as;
- Workers on zero hour contracts.
- Agency-related workers, casual and seasonal workers without permanent employment or employment contracts.
- Low-paid entrepreneurs who are deprived of the important rights that come with working and who are without income when they are unable to work, for example due to illness.
Of the 3.7 million, there are 2 million men and 1.7 million women. While women somewhat make up the majority in the first two categories, men make up the majority among low-paid entrepreneurs.
It is also known that one in six BME (Black & Minority Ethnic) workers are in unsafe working conditions.
The report from the TUC concludes that, instead of doing what they decided after the publication of the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices five years ago, the Government has contributed to an increasingly brutal working life. Today’s figures show that working life is getting worse for workers in the UK. These types of unsafe working conditions affect the lives of millions of workers and their families.
TUC also makes clear calls to governments on what they must do to ensure that every employee has decent working conditions. These are some of the proposals, all of which can be read in the reports on pages 12 and 13.
Strengthen collective bargaining and rules
• Trade unions should have access to the workplace to inform them about union membership and rights.
• The government should make new wage agreements, in which trade unions and employers negotiate across sectors.
• Rights in collective agreements should be extended to cover all wages and conditions, including wages and pensions, working hours and holidays, equality issues (including maternity and paternity rights), health and safety, complaints and disciplinary proceedings, training and development, work organization, including the introduction of new technologies and staffing levels.
Improve workers’ rights
Efforts should be made to strengthen labor protection, which should include:
• contract prohibitions and no-hours rules that say something about the notice period for changing hours and compensation for canceled shifts
• legal rights to all employment rights as employees, unless the employer can document that they are truly self-employed
• Stronger protection against unfair dismissal
Strengthen regulatory compliance and more control
For workers’ rights to be effective, they must be enforced and controlled.
Governments should invest in more inspectors, more investigations, and more other actions to enforce deals and laws.
In a time of labor shortages, one would think that it would be easier to get approval for increases in worker wages and working conditions, but it doesn’t look like that in the UK or Norway. And when the right to strike is deprived of unions, or as we have in Norway; that mandatory wage courts were introduced, employees had no tools left in their toolbox when they ended up in conflict. In Norway too, there are powers that want to abolish the right to strike and call it obsolete and “a relic of the past”.
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