To the stirring strains of the Marseillaise, a monochrome Angela Rayner reels off her plans for workers’ rights, as a red beret and a Gallic moustache jiggle around her head. “Angela Rayner’s Britain?” demands the title, alongside a tiny tricolour.
Tory messaging has become ever more bizarre as this gaffe-strewn campaign lurches towards a close, but Thursday’s example, warning that Labour may make the UK’s labour market un peu French, hit new heights of weirdness.
For one thing, the mention of France seems more likely to evoke pleasant holidays than picket lines. More importantly, polling suggests the policies Rayner set out in the clip – employment rights from day one of a job, banning fire and rehire, binning bogus self-employment – are popular with the public.
Recent TUC polling found that two-thirds of people supported employees having the right to unfair dismissal from day one – including 61% of 2019 Tory voters. Similarly, two-thirds were in favour of a ban on fire and rehire.
Two things probably underlie the groundswell of opinion that tougher rules are needed in the labour market. One is the plain fact that too many people have found themselves working hard and still unable to make ends meet. Real wage growth has been all but stagnant for the best part of 15 years, with average earnings a pathetic £16 a week higher than in 2010 – despite significant increases in the minimum wage (rebranded as the “national living wage”) under successive Conservative governments.
Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising some feel the balance has tipped too far from workers to employers – a sentiment that perhaps also partly explains the support for public sector strikes last year.
It is more than that, however: there is a sense not just of a lack of bargaining power, but of unfairness, injustice even, in the way the labour market works for those trapped at the bottom.
From “self-employed” gig economy workers summarily laid off via an app to social care staff exploited by rogue employers and shift workers unable to plan childcare because of last-minute changes, there is an infuriating impotence about so many people’s interactions with the labour market. That is only likely to increase as new technologies are used to monitor and even manage workers as they go about their jobs.
In theory, Labour’s new deal for working people should help to turn the tide, particularly when combined with the tougher approach to enforcement Rayner has promised.
Social care is set to be the testing ground for a new approach of “fair pay agreements” under which employers and unions will have to hammer out terms and conditions that ministers will then apply across the sector.
Unions will be given the right to enter workplaces and make the case for membership – something the GMB has only just won at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse under strict conditions as part of a statutory ballot. And a new Labour government would consult about establishing a single employment status, abolishing the halfway house of “worker”, which comes with more obligations than rights.
As with so many areas of Labour’s agenda, however, the details will be critical – as will timing. Fair pay agreements were introduced in New Zealand in 2022, but implementation took so long that not a single one had come into force before the government changed and the plan was scrapped.
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When, as seems likely, Rayner arrives at her desk as deputy prime minister on Friday, she will face intense pressure to water down the plans from business groups – and from some in her own party.
The Tory attack video echoed a line that originated with the CBI’s president, Rupert Soames, that Labour is poised to create a “European model” for the labour market. It is worth stressing how far away the UK is from that at present: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data suggests that 26% of workers here are covered by collective bargaining, for example, compared with 100% in Italy, 98% in France and 54% in Germany.
But Soames’s concerns will find an echo among some in Labour. Furious unions confronted the party earlier this year over what they saw as an effort to undermine the new deal for workers – with union insiders claiming the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was keen to burnish her business credentials by being seen to push back against the plans. A fragile peace broke out after a face-to-face meeting between union general secretaries and shadow cabinet members, including Keir Starmer, but much about the fine details will only become clear the other side of the election.
The necessity to regain business backing has been a key part of Labour’s plan to win Thursday’s vote. If it succeeds, as polls suggest, the question facing the party on Friday will be a very different one: how to wield that power?
Regulation of the labour market is knotty, unglamorous and the subject of intense lobbying, but it has the potential to change millions of people’s lives for the better. Rayner should embrace the beret, face down the doubters and be bold.