Work, inequality, justice and migration

Work and employment

Labour’s plans will create thousands of well paid, secure jobs in every town, village and city across the UK. We will truly make work pay – and make sure that those looking for work or who can’t work are properly supported.

The crisis of work

• The last 40 years have seen a transfer of power away from working people. This has meant that growing numbers of workers face stagnating pay, longer hours and growing insecurity.
• Wage stagnation under the Tories has cost the average worker around £6,300 in lost wages. Many face spiralling debts. Meanwhile dividends paid to shareholders are up 85%.

Labour’s plan for decent jobs and fair wages:

• Introduce a Real Living Wage of £10 per hour for over 16s immediately. Give financial support for the costs to small businesses.
• Simplify and strengthen trade union law to help trade union recognition and workers exercise their rights.
• Promote equality and tackle insecurity at work.
• Repeal the 2016 Trade Union Act, supporting individual and collective rights at work and implementing enforcement powers to make these rights meaningful.
• Introduce four new bank holidays.
• Set a target to reduce average full-time weekly working hours to 32 with no loss of pay within a decade, bringing an end to excessive working hours
• Set up Inclusive Ownership Funds (IOFs) in large companies. 10% collective ownership shares will give workers a stake in the companies they work for – and a share of the profits they help create.
• Ban unpaid internships.
• Tackle the Tories’ productivity crisis with a programme of large scale investment in skills, infrastructure and innovation.
• Ban zero-hour contracts.
• Extend statutory maternity pay to 12 months, double paternity leave and introduce bereavement leave.
• Create a new Department for Women and Equalities.
• Create an Emancipation Educational Trust to educate around migration and colonialism, and to address the legacy of slavery.
• End disability discrimination.
• Scrap Tory plans to raise the State Pension Age, leaving it at 66.

Security, crime and justice

Labour will make our communities safer, not just by reversing the Tories’ disastrous cuts to policing but by investing in public services to address the root causes of crime.

Our unsafe communities:

• After a decade of Conservative cuts to local services and the police our communities can feel unsafe.
• Under the Tories violent crime has risen sharply
• The number of police officers in Britain has fallen by over 20,000 since the Tories came to power

Labour’s plan:

• Invest in alternatives to custody, establish violence-reduction units and provide public health, mental health and early years services.
• Rebuild our youth services and guarantee young people’s access to youth workers. Invest in a youth justice system in which schools, local authorities, health authorities and youth services work together to divert young people away from the pathways towards crime.
• Recruit 2,000 more frontline police officers than the Tories. We will bring PFI prisons back in-house.
• Restore all legal aid advice, including for housing, social security, family and immigration cases.
• Establish a National Youth Service, guarantee every young person has access to local, high-quality youth work.

Migration

Labour will establish a humane immigration system and end the ‘hostile environment’. We will end 10 years of Tory mistreatment of people coming to Britain to make a life here.

The unjust migration system

• The Tories ‘Hostile Environment’ has seen British citizens wrongfully deported during the Windrush scandal, locked up asylum seekers illegally and created hostility towards people who have come here to make a new life.
• Thousands of key workers in the NHS have left Britain with the Tories threatening a hard brexit.
• The existing system keeps families apart – parents from their children – creating “skype families” because of extreme income thresholds and unfair rules.

Labour will:

• Scrap the Tory/Lib Dem 2014 Immigration Act and establish a humane immigration system built on human rights and aimed at meeting the skills and labour shortages that exist in our economy and public services.
• Regulate the labour market to to end the exploitation of all workers including migrant workers.
• Provide fair compensation to Windrush victims.
• End indefinite detention, close Yarl’s Wood and Brook House and find alternatives to the inhumane conditions of detention centres. Use savings £20 million support fund for survivors of modern slavery, people trafficking and domestic violence.
• Ensure justice for migrant domestic workers, restore the overseas domestic workers’ visa, end deportation of family members, end minimum income requirements for families.
• If we remain in the EU, freedom of movement will continue. If we leave, it will be subject to negotiations, with Labour pushing to retain the benefits of free movement as well as the rights of EU citizens in the UK.
• Uphold international legal obligations to refugees, give refugees humane treatment, refugees right to work, and access to public services.

Universal credit vs real social security

The next Labour government will scrap Universal Credit and replace it with a social security system dedicated to dignity, universalism and ending poverty.

The Universal Credit disaster

• Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world, yet we are also one of the most unequal countries in Europe.
• 8 million people live in poverty in working households. And 800,000 children live in poverty despite being in a working household.
• Food banks have given out 65 million meals in the last five years, the equivalent of a meal for every person in the whole of the UK.

Labour’s plan:

• Scrap Universal Credit and replace it with a social security system dedicated to dignity, universalism and ending poverty.
• Scrap the two child limit and benefit cap, which will lift up to 300,000 children out of poverty.
• End the five week wait, introduce fortnightly payments, suspend sanctions and end the digitised approach to benefits. Labour will protect women through split payments, and reduce homelessness by paying the housing element direct to landlords.
• Scrap the bedroom tax.
• Increase Employment and Support Allowance by £30 a week.
• Reduce the five week waiting period by introducing an interim payment, which will be paid three weeks after first making a claim.
• Set a target for ending the need for food banks altogether within our first three years, and halve food bank usage within our first year.
• End rough sleeping within a Parliament, starting with a plan to ring-fence an extra 8,000 homes for people with a history of rough sleeping and £100million to tackle immediate winter pressures.
• Keep the Triple Lock on state pensions and guarantee free TV licences, free bus passes and Winter Fuel Payments to support pensioners.
• Recruit 5000 new social security advisers, ending the ‘digital only’ approach.