Labour’s New Deal for Working People is our plan to make work pay. It’s how we’ll boost wages, make work more secure and support working people to thrive – delivering a genuine living wage, banning exploitative zero hour contracts, and ending fire and rehire.
Direct PDF Link, PDF archive. I'd suggest bookmarking the archive as parties have a habit of deleting stuff from past elections (e.g. Labour have deleted the PDF for their 2019 manifesto).
Lot's of waffling but here are the key policies I managed to pick out:
Ban 0-hour contracts, "ensuring everyone has the right to have a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work, based on a twelve-week reference period"
End the practice of fire-and-rehire
Worker protections from day one
Merge the current three-tier employment status into two categories of 'worker' and 'genuinely self-employed'
Strengthen redundancy rights
Strengthen protections for the self-employed
Family working
Make 'flexi-time' contracts the default (work hours that fit around children)
Ban firing women for six months after returning from maternity leave
Review the parental leave system within the first year of government
Right to bereavement leave for all workers
Ensure that surveillance technology can't be introduced without consultation
Make it so minimum wage considers the cost of living when calculating it
Remove age brackets from minimum wage
Remove the lower earnings limit and waiting period for statutory sick pay
Ensure hospitality workers receive the tips they earn
Ban unpaid internships, except when part of education or training course
Establish a new 'Fair Pay Agreement' for adult social care workers
Reinstate the School Support Staff Negotiating Body
Remove "unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity and ensuring industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining"
Repeal the Trade Union Act 2016 and Minimum Service Levels (Strikes) Bill and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2022
Allow electronic and workplace balloting for union votes
Remove the requirement for unions to prove at least 50% employee support to be recognised and make final ballot a simple majority
Give unions the right to access the workplace for recruitment and organising purposes
Strengthen protection for trade union reps
Close the gender pay gap
Include outsourced workers in calculations
Require firms with >250 staff to publish ethnicity and disability pay gaps
Require employers to provide support to employees going through menopause
Establish a single enforcement body for worker rights to replace the current fragmented system
Double the time limit where employees can bring a claim to an employment tribunal to six months
Allow workers to raise grievances to ACAS collectively
Extent the Freedom of Information Act to companies that have public contracts and publicly funded associations
Require public bodies to asses if work can be done more efficiently in-house before outsourcing to the private sector
Ensure public contract take into account 'social value' when being given out (e.g. local jobs, pay, trade union recognition)
Promises with no real policy attached:
Strengthen protections for whistleblowers
Help carers in the workforce
Give rights to people who work from home to be able to separate life from work
Ensure "regulations on travel time in sectors with multiple working sites is enforced and that workers’ contracts reflect the law" (this is copied verbatim twice across the document)
Bring employment tribunals 'up to standard'
Review health and safety regulations
Review guidance on working in extreme temperatures
Protections for people with long Covid
Increased legal duty for employers to tackle sexual harassment
They also say the terminally ill deserve "security and decency", but don't actually propose anything other than encouraging employers and trade unions to sign the Dying to Work Charter.
A thing not picked up above, but this document spends a lot of time batting for employers. Every mention of improving protections or abusive practices is accompanied with some statement along the lines of "most employers are already really good to their employees" or "ensure there is a good talent pool for employers".
As a trade union official myself, I'd just like to say that that is some seriously good shit. It's practically a wishlist of all the things I feel would make my job of representing people in distress easier.
I know Unite are critical, but other unions are less so. I'd suggest that Unite's criticisms are more about the strength of the pledges (i.e. how committed Labour are to implementing this stuff quickly) rather than the content of what's being promised. While they could always go further, this is nonetheless a really solid set of reforms.