Tackle Poverty and Inequality

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Work

Work

• Eradicate in-work poverty in our first term by tackling the structural causes of poverty and inequality, such as low pay and high living costs, while raising the floor provided by our social safety net
  
• Cap the total amount that can be paid in overdraft fees or interest on a loan
  
• Introduce a Real Living Wage of at least £10 per hour for all workers aged 16 and over
  
• Use savings to public finances to help small businesses manage the extra cost of the living wage
  
• Give workers a stake in the companies they work for by requiring large companies to set up Inclusive Ownership Funds (IOFs)
  
• Up to 10% of a company will be owned collectively by employees
• Dividend payments distributed equally among all, capped at £500 a year
• The cap will rise to ensure that no more than 25% of dividends raised by IOFs are redistributed in this way
• Explore other innovative ways of responding to low pay, including a pilot of Universal Basic Income
  
• Self-employed people will benefit from a broad range of policies, from free childcare, full-fibre broadband to face-to-face lending and business support through our Post Bank
  
• Seek to develop tailored support and protections for the self- employed, including: collective income protection insurance schemes, annual income assessments for those on Universal Credit, and better access to mortgages and pension schemes
  
• tackle late payments that leave small businesses and the self-employed waiting months to be paid, including banning late payers from public procurement
  

Ministry for Employment Rights

• Transform people’s lives for the better through the biggest extension of workers’ rights in history
  
• Give working people a voice at the Cabinet table by establishing a Ministry for Employment Rights
  
• Start to roll out sectoral collective bargaining across the economy
  
• Bring workers and employers together to agree legal minimum standards on a wide range of issues, such as pay and working hours
  
• Sectoral collective bargaining will increase wages and reduce inequality
  
• Sectoral collective bargaining will also stop good employers being undercut by bad employers
• Give everyone full rights from day one on the job
• Strengthen protections for whistleblowers and rights against unfair dismissal for all workers
• End bogus self-employment and creating a single status of ‘worker’ for everyone apart from those genuinely self-employed in business on their own account
  
• Introduce a legal right to collective consultation on the implementation of new technology in workplaces
  
• Ban zero-hour contracts and strengthening the law so that those who work regular hours for more than 12 weeks will have a right to a regular contract
  
• Increase wages through sectoral collective bargaining
  
• Require breaks during shifts to be paid
  
• Require cancelled shifts to be paid and proper notice for changes in hours
  
• Give all workers the right to flexible working
  
• Extend statutory maternity pay from nine to 12 months
  
• Double paternity leave from two weeks to four and increase statutory paternity pay
  
• Introduce statutory bereavement leave, guarantee workers time off to grieve the loss of close family members or following miscarriage
  
• Introduce four new bank holidays celebrating our four patron saints’ days
  
• Review family-friendly employment rights, including rights to respond to family emergencies
  
• Require employers to devise and implement plans to eradicate the gender pay gap – and pay inequalities underpinned by race and/or disability – or face fines
  
• Require employers to maintain workplaces free of harassment, including harassment by third parties
  
• Increase protection against redundancy for people wherever they work
  
• Give statutory rights to equalities representatives
  
• Set up a Royal Commission to bring health (including mental health) and safety legislation up to date
  
• Ensure that public-facing workers are protected by toughening the law against abuse and violence
  
• Banning unpaid internships
  
• Allow trade unions to use secure electronic and workplace ballots
  
• Remove unnecessary restrictions on industrial action.
  
• Strengthen and enforce trade unions’ right of entry to workplaces to organise, meet and represent their members and to recruit
  
• Ban union-busting, strengthen protection of trade union representatives against unfair dismissal and union members from intimidation, harassment, threats and blacklisting
  
• Repeal anti-trade union legislation including the Trade Union Act 2016 and create new rights and freedoms for trade unions to help them win a better deal for working people
  
• Simplify the law around union recognition
  
• Give union reps adequate time off for union duties
  
• Develop collective income- protection insurance schemes for the self-employed
  
• Introduce a maximum workplace temperature to protect workers and require employers to take counteracting measures
  
• Bring UK law into line with the International Labour Organisation standards it has ratified
  

Working Time

• Tackle excessive working hours
  
• Within a decade we will reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 across the economy, with no loss of pay, funded by productivity increases
  
• End the opt-out provision for the EU Working Time Directive and enforcing working-time regulations
  
• Set up an independent Working Time Commission to advise on raising minimum holiday entitlements and reducing maximum weekly working time
  
• Invest to increase productivity and making sure workers share the benefits
  
• Keep restrictions on Sunday trading in place and review unpaid overtime

Enforcement

• Introduce a new, unified Workers’ Protection Agency (WPA) to enforce workplace rights, including the Real Living Wage
  
• WPA will be given extensive powers to inspect workplaces and bring prosecutions and civil proceedings on workers’ behalf
  
• Keep employment tribunals free, extend their powers, and introduce new Labour Courts with a stronger role for people with industrial experience on panels
  

Rewriting the Rules

• Take on short-termism and corporate greed, making sure good businesses are rewarded, not undercut
  
• Rewrite the rules of the economy and ensure everyone plays by them
  
• Amend the Companies Act, requiring companies to prioritise long-term growth while strengthening protections for stakeholders, including smaller suppliers and pension funds
  
• Tackle late payments that leave small businesses waiting months to be paid, including banning late payers from public procurement
  
• For small businesses, we will ensure no quarterly reporting for businesses below the VAT threshold
  
• Require one-third of boards to be reserved for elected worker-directors and give them more control over executive pay
• Introduce a broader ‘public interest test’ to prevent hostile takeovers and asset-stripping weakening our industrial base and destroying treasured home-grown companies
• Give workers a voice on public bodies such as the Competition and Markets Authority ff9=Let struggling companies go into protective administration, so they can be sold as a going concern rather than collapsing into insolvency
• Separate audit and accounting activities in major firms and impose more robust rules on auditors
  
• Tackle regulatory capture and streamline regulation by creating a new Business Commission, responsive to parliamentary select committees
  

Social Justice Commission

• Usher in a new era of social justice in Britain
  
• Replace the Social Mobility Commission with a Social Justice Commission, based in the Treasury, with wide-ranging powers to hold us, and future governments, to account
  

Women and Equalities

Women and Equalities

• Create a new Department for Women and Equalities, with a full-time Secretary of State
  
• Ensure all our policies and laws are equality-impact assessed in order to deliver a fairer society for women and all under-represented groups
  
• Establish a modernised National Women’s Commission as an independent advisory body to contribute to a Labour government
  
• Ratify both the Istanbul Convention on preventing domestic abuse and the ILO Convention on Violence and Harassment at work
  
• Create a new ground for discrimination on the basis of socio-economic disadvantage
  

Women

• Take action to close the gender pay gap by 2030
  

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