Fast-track Labour’s New Deal into law

Labour’s New Deal for Working People will be a game-changer. It will restore rights at work for millions of people. So I want to see it turned into legislation in the first year of a Labour government.

I want union organisers given access to every workplace by law; a fair pay agreement negotiated in every sector of industry; full employment rights for every worker from day one of the job; an end to zero hours contracts, bogus self employment and “fire-and-rehire”.

Decades of experience as a trade union rep tell me this will not be easy. As an NUJ activist in the late 1990s I saw Labour’s Employment Relations Act watered down by corporate pressure. The UK’s entire business model has been built around insecure work, unequal pay, and stagnating real wages.

We need to scrap the Tory anti-union laws. And wherever Labour is wields influence – from councils to city regions to the new national industrial strategy we’ve pledged – I want to see unions recognised as statutory social partners.

In the meantime I will always stand with them on the picket line. I took part in the first mass picket of the Thatcher era – at Hadfields in Sheffield. I was on the picket lines during the 1984-5 miners’s strike and at Wapping. So I know that everything working people have, we had to fight for.