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As soon as once more we begin a brand new yr with the nation within the grip of Covid-19.
However as 2022 dawns, the UK ought to have been higher ready for the disruption of a brand new variant.
In March 2020, the TUC and unions pressed the chancellor to undertake our detailed proposals for a furlough scheme – an emergency response to the primary wave of the pandemic. It was an enormous success – defending thousands and thousands of jobs, maintaining companies open, making the reopening smoother and faster and ensuring households everywhere in the UK might pay their payments.
Now, as we face Omicron, we’re having the identical outdated argument about whether or not authorities ought to step in and defend working folks’s livelihoods in a disaster.
It’s been clear for months that the UK wants a everlasting short-time working scheme, studying from the success of furlough, to guard jobs in periods of financial turbulence.
Such schemes are common across Europe and assist preserve companies afloat when there’s a sudden non permanent collapse in demand. However ministers have chosen to not pay attention.
After chopping off furlough prematurely within the autumn, the federal government watched as Omicron hammered our arts, hospitality and aviation sectors within the run-up to Christmas.
Whereas the chancellor’s 11-hour rescue package for pubs, restaurants and theatres will assist some, severe injury has already been completed to pay packets and to livelihoods. We have to finish this stop-start strategy to managing our economic system.
Companies and dealing households shouldn’t be put by an emotional rollercoaster each time the pandemic flares up. They want monetary certainty and stability in order that when higher occasions return our economic system can bounce again quick.
Having a everlasting short-time working scheme in place, conditional on upskilling and retraining, will be certain that if new restrictions should be imposed once more there’s help able to go. However we are able to’t cease there. We have to construct an economic system that may assist working households face the long run with confidence.
There are large challenges on the horizon. Alongside Covid, local weather change is already inflicting international chaos and threatening jobs in power intensive industries like metal and manufacturing. The longer we delay attending to internet zero, the extra jobs will likely be put in danger.
And let’s not overlook the looming cost-of-living storm. The final 11 years have been the worst period for real wage growth because the Napoleonic wars. And this has come at an enormous price to folks’s dwelling requirements.
Over half of households in poverty immediately are working households. And plenty of of our key employees – maintaining hospitals and public companies operating – are nonetheless incomes much less in actual phrases than in 2010. It’s a nationwide shame. With out motion, the stress on UK family budgets will solely worsen in 2022.
This spring, working households face a triple whammy of skyrocketing bills, cuts to common credit score and a hike in nationwide insurance coverage contributions. We urgently want a long-term financial plan for getting wages rising.
And the easiest way to start out is by getting extra employees coated by collective agreements, sector-by-sector – to allow them to negotiate a good pay rise with employers. Giving commerce unions larger entry to workplaces is the important thing to boosting pay and employment requirements throughout the nation.
And it’s not simply me saying this. The OECD and governments the world over, from America to New Zealand, have recognised the important thing position collective bargaining can play in lowering inequality and giving folks safety at work.
Committing to industry-wide truthful pay agreements would rework the lives of thousands and thousands by setting minimal requirements – on pay, coaching, well being and security – and stop good employers from being undercut by the dangerous.
And fair pay agreements would assist ease staffing shortages in under-pressure sectors like logistics, meals manufacturing and social care, by making these industries higher locations to work in.
Whether or not they can increase dwelling requirements and dealing circumstances is the acid check of the federal government’s levelling up agenda.
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Alongside campaigning for a pay rise for working folks, we’re nonetheless ready for the employment invoice Boris Johnson promised over two years in the past. Tackling insecure work, outlawing fireplace and rehire and banning zero-hours contracts – all are lengthy overdue.
As too is fixing our damaged sick pay system. It beggars perception that we’re heading into one other wave of the pandemic with thousands and thousands unable to afford to self-isolate.
This yr is a crossroads. Beset by pandemics and local weather chaos, we are able to preserve reeling from disaster to disaster, unleashing rampant insecurity and inequality anew. Or we are able to harness the facility of lively authorities – in partnership with unions and employers – to create a fairer and extra resilient economic system.
On this age of hysteria, working persons are crying out for safety. That’s my want for 2022.
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