[IER] Low pay & social care studies provide further evidence to support IER Manifesto

Fri Nov 30 14:34:12 GMT 2018

IER News Brief 30/11/18Follow us on Twitter  
news brief
Friday 30th November 2018
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Research from the Low Pay Commission (LPC) and a report from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) have both provided further evidence to support the Institute of Employment Rights' Manifesto for Labour Law proposals.

The Manifesto of Labour Law sets out 25 recommendations for reform, further developed in the more detailed second edition: Rolling Out the Manifesto for Labour Law. Several of our key recommendations have been adopted by the Labour Party, with Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey announcing their support.

The overarching aim of the Manifesto is to shift the focus of labour law away from statutory individual rights and towards collective ones, thereby addressing the innate imbalance of power between workers and employers and reversing today's 'norm' of each worker being left to police their own rights despite having few avenues through which to effectively do so.

Our major proposals - such as establishing a Ministry of Labour Law to represent workers in parliament, reinstating sectoral collective bargaining, granting the full suite of employment rights to all workers from day one, and creating an independent Labour Inspectorate to enforce the law - mirror existing frameworks that have already proven highly successful in comparable developed economies.

One key impact of our proposals would be a rise in wages, particularly among the lowest paid (who we recommend should earn at least the Real Living Wage - calculated to cover the basic cost of living). The 26 leading lawyers and academics who authored the Manifesto argue that this will encourage employers to move away from a model based on competing over labour costs, and instead towards competing by investment in their businesses, particularly in research and development and upskilling staff, in order to develop higher quality services and products and improve their productivity.

Indeed, research from the LPC has this week provided more evidence to support this argument. Despite protestations from the business community that the introduction of the National Living Wage (a higher minimum wage) would lead to mass job cuts, the LPC could find no evidence of this happening since it came into effect in 2016, nor when it was raised in 2017. 

Instead, employers have adapted by shifting their business models, including restructuring their managerial levels, narrowing the income gap between higher and lower earners, and accepting lower profit lines. The next step, employers told the LPC, would be to invest in the productivity of their businesses.

Elsewhere, there was further support for sectoral collective bargaining, with the IPPR calling on the government to introduce the system into the social care sector, where low pay and insecure conditions have been repeatedly demonstrated to lead to low-quality and sometimes dangerous care standards for the most vulnerable in society. The report draws on the IER's report 8 Good Reasons Why Adult Social Care Needs Sectoral Collective Bargaining, which explains how the Manifesto recommendations can be implemented in the industry to solve many of the problems it currently faces in one fell swoop.

Read more about our recommendations for reform in the Manifesto for Labour Law 

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 News and commentSupport the IER in its 30th Anniversary year 
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> click here to read full story Study: Pay rises hit profit at the top, not employment at the bottom 
Whenever there are proposals to increase pay, business lobbyists argue the move will lead employers to cut their staff, but the latest report from the Low Pay Commission (LPC) has busted this myth. 
> click here to read full story IPPR joins IER in support of sectoral collective bargaining in social care 
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has joined the Institute of Employment Rights (IER) in recommending the reinstatement of sectoral collective bargaining in the social care sector. 
> click here to read full story Art educators take bogus self-employment case to tribunal 
A group of 27 art educators has taken the National Gallery to tribunal to challenge their employment status. 
> click here to read full story Austerity-driven inequality not "inevitable", it was a choice, says EHRC 
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said widening inequality seen in the UK as a result of austerity policies was a political choice, not an inevitability. 
> click here to read full story Unpaid carers “urgently” need better employment rights, researchers say 
Researchers at the University of Lancaster have called on the government to improve employment rights for workers with care responsibilities. 
> click here to read full story 
Help Santa raise money for rights at work! 
On Sunday 2nd of December, our National Coordinator James Harrison will be donning his Santa Suit to run the 'Santa Dash', a 5k run in the heart of Liverpool City centre. He's doing this to raise money for the Institute of Employment Rights, in order to help us to promote and popularise our proposals to increase workplace rights, as defined by our recent publication 'Rolling out the manifesto for labour law'. 
> click here to sponsor James   Employment Law Timeline Employment law developments under the Conservative government 
This week on our timeline of employment and trade union law developments under the Conservative government: The majority of Tory MPs do not believe a crisis of education funding exists and the Health Secretary wants the NHS to try and be more like McDonalds 
> click here to explore the timeline 
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Backed by the Labour Party and the UK's major unions, the comprehensive recommendations detailed in this volume have been collaboratively authored by 26 leading labour lawyers and academics from some of the most prestigious universities in the UK. Taken together, they put forth a new framework for industrial relations and workers’ rights designed to better-fit the needs of a post-Brexit, increasingly automated and fragmented workforce. 
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