How Your General Election Vote Could Affect Your Employment Rights

Dispute Resolution

Farming - 2 minutes read

The 8th June 2017 will come upon us all a lot quicker than we may realise. Between now and then, a whole host of rhetoric and promises will be thrust upon us from the left & right political parties and media alike.

In this post, I take a quick snapshot at some of the things the Labour and Conservative parties (no bias or favour shown to either or those parties not mentioned!) respectively promise in their manifestos regarding employment rights:

LABOUR

  1. All workers equal rights from day one, whether part-time or full-time
  2. Banning zero hours contracts so that every worker gets a guaranteed number of hours each week
  3. Raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage
  4. Ending the public sector pay cap
  5. Instituting a maximum pay ratio of 20:1 in the public sector and companies bidding for public contracts
  6. Banning unpaid internships
  7. Abolishing employment tribunal fees 
  8. Giving self-employed workers the status of workers
  9. Setting up a commission to modernise the law around employment status
  10. Creating a Ministry of Labour with the resources to enforce workers’ rights

CONSERVATIVE

  1. Statutory right to unpaid care lease
  2. General better rights for gig economy workers 
  3. 2 weeks’ paid leave for parents who lose a child
  4. Workers not to lose any protections they enjoy under EU law after Brexit
  5. An extension of the gender pay gap reporting obligation to ethnicity
  6. Improvement of worker representation on the board of companies
  7. Statutory time off for training
  8. Greater protection from irresponsible company behavior
  9. Feeding from point 8 above, Jeremy Hunt included rumours that he was going to allow workers with mental health conditions (e.g. strses) to be protected against disability discrimination without the need to have had the condition for more than a year.
  10. Rise in the over 25 year olds’ annual NMW by 2022 (currently £7.50 p/hr)