They are the kind of reforms that generate plenty of support on social media, and will please the party’s mainly professional, public sector base that is always happy to award itself some more time off so long as everyone’s pay and pensions benefits remain just as generous.
Over the last few weeks, the party has been busily watering down many of the reforms, with pledges for extra legal rights replaced with vague commitments to best practice. The party’s leadership is desperate to keep big business on board as it heads into an election.
According to the Unite union, the latest version of the package is “totally unrecognisable”, while its general secretary Sharon Graham described it as a “betrayal”. The final version of the plan is set to be hammered out over the next few weeks, and we will see what is included in the final manifesto when the general election is called.
It won’t be the headline rights that really matter, however. The meat of the plan will be in the detail. The most significant reform is also the most technical. In its 2021 policy outline, the party committed itself to “sectoral collective bargaining” for the whole economy.
As the law firm Lewis Silkin put it in an analysis of the plans, this is “the single most radical proposal in its 2021 Green Paper”.
What does it mean? In effect, under sectoral bargaining there will be fair pay agreements for every different sector of the economy, hammered out at a national level between the Government, the unions, and employer’s associations.
A nationally agreed wage will be set for, say, dental assistants, or care workers, or engineers, or retail workers, bar staff, and dozens of other everyday roles. If you are running a restaurant in Staffordshire, you will be told what to pay the chef, and a vet’s clinic in Somerset will be told how much their receptionist will be paid.
That will be a radical change for the UK. In this country, only 26pc of workers overall are covered by collective wage agreements, and just 13pc of employees in the private sector (the bulk of them in construction and transport where they have a longer history).
They are more common in some continental European countries, with 99pc of jobs covered in Italy, 98pc in France, and 51pc in Germany, but it is hardly a great idea to try and copy labour systems that have generated permanently higher levels of unemployment, especially among young people.
In reality, it is complete madness to try and micromanage the pay and conditions of 32 million people with jobs in the UK.
There are three huge problems. First, it tries to create one set of national standards for businesses that vary according to local conditions, who their customers are, and what part of the market they serve.
Should the chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Marlow be paid more or less than his or her equivalent at a roadside cafe in Derbyshire? Or should a dental technician be paid the same in prosperous Cheshire as in far poorer Wrexham, even though housing and other costs will be wildly different?
Surely not. All we will do is end up setting rates that are completely wrong for everybody.
Next, it will push up wages. Just as the National Living Wage has gone up far faster than inflation, we can be sure the “fair wage” for each industry will keep on rising, especially if Angela Rayner is chairing its meetings.
