The government must keep progressing workers’ rights for everyone

We help people with hundreds of thousands of employment problems every year — so we’re calling for a Fair Work Authority

Employment problems are the fourth biggest issue affecting our clients. Last year we helped 165,000 people with 330,000 work-related issues — and we’ve long called for measures to improve income security, especially for those at the sharp end of insecure work practices.

Despite people considering income security to be as important as how much they’re paid, 4.5 million are in potentially insecure work. They need rights to protect them and they need to know what these are. When rights have been infringed, people need to be able to enforce them.

Karen has a zero-hours contract with a care provider. She usually works 20–30 hours a week, and her recent average earnings are £1200 a month. She’s not able to work for several weeks because of medical treatment she has just undergone. She has given her employer a current sick note.

Karen hasn’t been paid at all this month as her employer is wrongly believes that her zero-hours contract exempts her from entitlement for Statutory Sick Pay. As a result, she doesn’t have enough money to live on, or meet her mortgage payments. At Citizens Advice she was given food bank vouchers to help her feed her family while she gets help from an employment lawyer.

If Karen’s rights had been clearer and easier to enforce, it would have been easier for her to receive the Statutory Sick Pay she was entitled to.

Acting on the challenges of the modern labour market

Today, the government released their response to the Matthew Taylor Review of Modern Employment. While the journey so far has take over 14 months, it’s great to see the government starting to take action to make many of Taylor’s recommendations a reality.

In our own submission to the review, we made 3 key recommendations:

1. The types of employment and people’s rights at work should be clear and transparent
2. The system of employment rights and protections should be accessible and responsive, ensuring rights adapt to changing labour market practices
3. A broad and long term commitment by government and employers is needed to create stable and decent jobs.

The government’s response continues the journey in the right direction. 5 proposed changes in particular could make a difference:

1. Extending enforcement to holiday and sick pay is a very good step — and something we’ve been calling for. It will help the many people struggling to understand and have access to their rights.
2. Extending rights by making it easier for people to build up a period of continuous service. This seems very technical but changes to the way continuity of employment is calculated will benefit people who work for the same employer over long periods, but might not carry out work or be allocated shifts every week.
3. Changing the way holiday pay is calculated helps more people get holiday pay that better reflects the actual work they do. This will particularly helps workers with fluctuating hours who can currently lose out on holiday pay.
4. Giving all workers the right to request a contract with stable hours and pay. This will need teeth to be effective, but does mean people could be working in jobs that provide more financial security.
5. Putting in place measures to make sure people know their rights in the first place including the introduction of the right to a payslip and written terms on day 1 of employment for all workers — so people know and understand these conditions from the very beginning.

Even when the government implements these recommendations, for them to be truly effective the Government must also ensure effective enforcement.

That’s why we’re calling for a Fair Work Authority

Every year we see first hand the many barriers people face when trying to enforce their rights. It’s often not clear where they should go when they have a problem in the first place.

There are over 13 different bodies or teams dealing with different aspects of labour market enforcement, from the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority to HMRC’s National Minimum Wage enforcement team. This can be confusing to navigate, and is complicated even further when people have multiple problems. Some employment rights don’t have a corresponding enforcement body at all. This fragmentation can also make it harder to raise awareness of rights at work.

Aside from simplifying the problem, enforcement also needs to be properly resourced. Since the 2010 Spending Review, the government has drastically cut funding for labour inspection agencies, even when increases for National Living Wage enforcement are taken into account. The Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate (EASI) budget has dropped by almost half, from £932,000 in 2011 to £500,000 last year.

Extending government enforcement to cover holiday and sick pay is a big step in the right direction. To really get to grips with enforcement of employment rights we believe the government needs to work towards introducing a well resourced Fair Work Authority.

A fast changing labour market demands fast action to help people now

With such a complicated and wide reaching issue, the government is right to be cautious about changing the law without seeking views — especially given the huge diversity of businesses and workers in the UK. But the pace of change is concerning given how rapidly practices in our labour market are evolving.

The government’s proposals could be a step in the right direction. But with four consultations, stretching up to 16 weeks in length, we still don’t know the position on some key labour market issues. That potentially means a two year delay between the start of the Taylor review and any significant changes to people’s employment rights.

During this time there will still be people who don’t have the rights they need, and aren’t aware of the rights their entitled to. Change in our labour market isn’t going to stop. We need to be able to react quicker than this to stop people from losing out.