![Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, anticipates the King's Speech will prove to bosses that Labour's radical overhaul is going ahead](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/business/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000385208920_17208166498120_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqY9gCLV5OlOMXDwStGd2AfyfTvwFrktYuqdkXqEfMJk0.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Labour is coming for ‘c----- employers’ like Wetherspoons, says union chief
Interview: Paul Nowak says only bad apples should fear the impending shake-up
![Paul Nowak, TUC General Secretary, anticipates the King's Speech will prove to bosses that Labour's radical overhaul is going ahead](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/business/2024/07/12/TELEMMGLPICT000385208920_17208166498120_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqY9gCLV5OlOMXDwStGd2AfyfTvwFrktYuqdkXqEfMJk0.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Labour will make “c----- employers” such as Amazon and Wetherspoons pay the price for bad behaviour, the head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has said.
Paul Nowak said he expected the King’s Speech this week to prove to bosses that Labour’s radical workers’ rights overhaul is going ahead as planned despite fierce lobbying from UK plc.
Nowak said companies are right to fear the changes, but only if they’re one of the bad apples.
“To good employers there’s nothing to worry about, to bad employers then I’m sorry,” Nowak said. “If c----- employers have to pay the price then they have to pay the price.”
Labour’s New Deal for Working People, a package of measures designed to boost workers’ rights, includes protection from unfair dismissal from day one, ending zero-hour contracts, banning “fire and rehire” practices and increasing the minimum wage.
However, the proposals have irked both employers, with bosses warning the plans will damage investment, and unions, who have complained some promises won’t be adopted until there has been a formal consultation process with companies.
Labour has said it will legislate for an employment rights bill within the first 100 days of entering office. Rupert Soames, president of business lobby group the Confederation of British Industry, warned boardrooms last year to “wake up, smell the coffee – this is a major thing that’s coming up”.
Pressed on which businesses are the so-called bad apples, Nowak listed the “likes of Amazon, Sports Direct, P&O Ferries and Wetherspoons” which he argued are “all anti-union employers who have built their business models on low-paid, insecure employment”.
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A Wetherspoons spokesman said the union chief had “got the wrong end of the stick”, arguing the pub chain is regularly voted a top employer and pays staff “more in bonuses and free shares as a percentage of its profits, than possibly any other listed company”. A spokesman for Amazon said staff can choose whether to join a union, adding that it regularly reviewed pay to ensure it offered competitive wages and benefits.
The spokesman added: “Our minimum starting pay in the UK is between £12.30 and £13 per hour, depending on location.”
Sports Direct was contacted for comment. P&O Ferries declined to comment.
Speaking at Congress House, the TUC’s London headquarters which is located in a Grade II-listed building featured in The Crown, Nowak said he expected to be at the forefront of conversations with Whitehall and has prepared a wishlist before his first official meeting with Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
As civil servants compile a dossier on the state of public finances ahead of Reeves’ first Budget, Nowak wants to make clear that the TUC’s 5.5 million members “don’t care if GDP grows if their wages are stagnant”.
An economic indicator of success needs to be UK workers feeling richer, rather than just focusing on the size of the economy. He also wants the tax burden to shift “from working people to the wealthy” and is urging Reeves to think as “flexibly as possible on fiscal rules”.
Union bosses are already trying to influence future policy decisions as their power grows. TUC membership “went up by the thick end of 100,000 last year”, Nowak said, adding that workers who would never have considered striking before, from bakers to physiotherapists, are now seeing the results and taking action.
He said this marked the “beginning of the revitalisation of the trade union movement – we are back firmly in the mainstream”.
That means having an equal seat at the table with business chiefs when it comes to influencing policy on bodies like the Government’s new Industry Strategy Council, he said.
Relations with this government will be very different to the last – just before his meeting with Reeves, Nowak pointed out how Jeremy Hunt refused to meet him. He has been reaching out to his New Labour-era predecessors Brendan Barber and John Monks for advice on how best to navigate the handover of power.
Nowak said: “Their [Barber and Monks] reflection is that the ‘new deal for workers’ is a far more comprehensive and potentially transformative programme than the 1997 Labour government in terms of the world of work.”
Monks, who was TUC leader under Sir Tony Blair, once accused the former prime minister of treating unions like “embarrassing elderly relatives” at a family party. So who do they feel like now?
“A good family friend that you can trust to be loyal and supportive and also to tell you when you’re getting it wrong,” Nowak said. “No government should surround themselves with ‘yes people’. The idea that unions and the Government will never fall out is fanciful.”
![Angela Rayner](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2024/06/08/TELEMMGLPICT000300059161_17178698892130_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
There will be plenty of fraught conversations in the months ahead. Despite a strong economic rebound following last year’s recession, Nowak said that Sir Keir Starmer has “inherited an absolute economic mess” and “nobody has rose-tinted specs thinking they can fix the country’s problems overnight”.
Some question whether Labour can truly fix the country’s problems at all. Lord Peter Mandelson, who helped Labour sweep to power in the 1990s, last week warned that it wasn’t the hard Left he was worried about but “something potentially worse. Softness. Compromise. Fudge”.
There have long been fears that Labour’s pledge to be both pro-business and pro-worker is impossible to achieve and will leave both sides unhappy.
In the run-up to the election, union insiders said they felt blindsided because the wording of Labour’s workers’ rights package did not match the demands they made during a marathon five-hour meeting aimed at preventing the policies from being watered down.
Unite, Labour’s biggest union donor, has argued that the revised document had “more holes in it than Swiss cheese”. On the other side, an employers’ group last week claimed that Labour’s plans to give workers a right to switch off threatens to create a “playground for ambulance chasers”.
Nowak does not fear there will be too much compromise. “That’s not my worry,” he said, adding that unions will ensure all the promises Labour have made to workers are “delivered in full”. He added that overhauling workers’ rights doesn’t involve a huge amount of money but sends out a clear signal to bad bosses.
“I don’t see any contradiction at all about giving people job security, decent pay, good employment rights and having a successful, competitive economy,” he said.
Part of his confidence stems from a trip to Spain at the end of 2022, when Nowak went on a “fact-finding” mission with Labour politicians including then-shadow employment minister Justin Madders to figure out how the country’s socialist government brought unions and employers together on transforming workers’ rights.
Nowak said: “What we saw there was a government that went into an election saying ‘we are going to regulate the gig economy’, and of course they were talking to the gig economy employers about how that was going to happen but they weren’t giving them a veto.
“I expect some of the backwoodsmen in the employer organisations to come out and say there’s no way we can live with ‘day one’ employment rights, and I hope and expect Labour will face them down.”
Unions expect to be at the forefront of policy decisions over the coming months, leading some businesses to fear that there could be a push for more extreme, Corbyn-era ideas.
There is an expectation that Sir Keir will rehash some policies from Jeremy Corbyn’s infamous 2017 manifesto, such as making it easier for unions to carry out strike ballots. Would Nowak have preferred to see Corbyn as leader?
“No, you deal with the government you’ve got,” he said. “I’m not really interested in playing top trumps on who should be in the cabinet and who should be leader and what decisions should be made. What I’m interested in is a Labour prime minister who will drive positive change.”