Tag Archives: employment

Israel isn’t the only home of fake news – is it, Victoria Atkins?

Tory fake news: yes, they’re talking about child poverty.

Following up on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research showing the number of people in the UK who are destitute has doubled since 2018… it seems to have triggered Tory MP Victoria Atkins.

Check out this video clip:

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Economist Richard Murphy takes issue with the claim that 3.8 million more people being in work is any use in combating destitution:

To This Writer, it suggests that being in work is not the way out of poverty that the Tories keep parroting it is.

But they keep saying it. Isn’t it time someone debunked this falsehood?


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One rule for them: shocking government double-standard over pay is revealed

Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.

Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.

In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.

And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.

Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.

Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:

The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).

If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.

MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.

Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.

This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.

And still they want more.

Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?

The article states:

MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.

The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.

Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.

Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.

Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.

The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.

Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?

Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:

Let’s have a look at the list.

Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.

Then:

Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.

Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.

Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.

Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.

Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.

Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.

Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.

Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.

Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.

The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?

And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).

Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:

Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:

Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”

Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?

I don’t.

Note this also:

Now consider this:

These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.

Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:

Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.

This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.

This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:

By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.


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Report on how officials failed to prevent Errol Graham’s death is compromised by dishonesty

Death by DWP: Errol Graham.

Well done to the mainstream media for finally reporting on the case of Errol Graham, nearly five years after he starved to death, having lost his benefits due to a Department for Work and Pensions decision.

And no – that comment is not meant well.

With a little more media attention, it seems likely that the DWP would not have been able to hide information from the Nottingham City Adult Safeguarding Board, whose review of the case, published this week, may now have to be revised.

Disability News Service, which broke the story in 2020, has provided documents that seem to have been withheld by the DWP, and says the Safeguarding Board is now reviewing them alongside its own actions.

Let’s just remind you of the circumstances of the case:

The Department for Work and Pensions ignored its own safeguarding advice to deprive Errol Graham of his benefits.

Left with no income, Mr Graham starved to death.

He had been receiving incapacity benefit, and then ESA, for many years as a result of enduring mental distress that had led to him being sectioned.

The DWP stopped Mr Graham’s Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) entitlement – and backdated that decision to the previous month – after making two unsuccessful visits to his home to ask why he had not attended a face-to-face Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on August 31, 2017.

He had not been asked to fill in an ESA50 questionnaire, though. Why not?

The government department managed to stop an ESA payment that had been due to be credited to his bank account on October 17, the same day it made the second unsuccessful safeguarding visit.

Its own rules state that it should have made both safeguarding visits before stopping the benefits of a vulnerable claimant.

Not only that, but the DWP had needed – but failed – to seek further medical evidence from Mr Graham’s GP, in order to make an informed decision about him.

In fact, it seems this would not have made much difference as Mr Graham’s GP had not seen him since 2013, or recalled him for vital blood tests or issued prescriptions since 2015, despite medical conditions including significant, long-term mental distress and hypothyroidism.

Because he had lost his entitlement to ESA, Mr Graham’s housing benefit was also stopped.

When bailiffs knocked down his front door to evict him on June 20, 2018, they found a dead body that weighed just four and a half stone. The only food in the flat was a couple of out-of-date tins of fish.

Mr Graham was 57 years old.

On an ESA form years before, he had told the DWP he could not cope with “unexpected changes”, adding: “Upsets my life completely. Feel under threat and upset…”

He said: “Cannot deal with social situations. Keep myself to myself. Do not engage with strangers. Have no social life. Feel anxiety and panic in new situations.”

So without warning, the DWP flung him into exactly the kind of new – and harrowing – situation that he would be unable to handle.

Now it seems that

An independent safeguarding review into the “shocking and disturbing” events leading to Graham’s tragic and lonely death concluded that multiple failings by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), his GP practice, and social landlord meant that chances to save him were missed.

Describing Graham as a “man in acute mental distress who had shut himself away from the world”, Nottingham City Adult Safeguarding Board said decisions taken by all three agencies had exacerbated his problems towards the end of his life rather than supporting him.

Strange, that. How many years has it been since the DWP and the Tory government in general started insisting that their decisions always support benefit claimants?

That clearly seems to have been untrue. Agreed?

The review said DWP and Nottingham City Homes had failed to understand why Graham did not respond to their letters, texts and home visits, and so did not grasp the extent of his vulnerability when they left him without money, food and on the verge of homelessness.

Although both agencies had followed their own procedures correctly when they took critical decisions to deny Graham of vital services, the review makes clear such procedures were based on “partial information and misconceptions” about why Graham had refused to engage with them.

How did they follow their own procedures correctly? My understanding is that the failed to follow their own safeguarding advice. It was known that he was a vulnerable claimant so, after he failed to attend an appointment, why did the DWP stop his benefit – and backdate the stoppage – before it had carried out the two safeguarding visits it was required to do?

Why hadn’t the DWP sought further medical evidence about him, as required?

It was known that he could not cope with “unexpected changes”, as he had made it clear in an ESA form years before.

Oh… but the DWP never provided that information to the Safeguarding Board. Isn’t that outright dishonesty?

The Safeguarding Board said

A key lesson from Graham’s death was that his refusal to engage with support services did not negate his vulnerability and was not an excuse for inaction on the part of service providers. “Indeed, non-engagement may be a sign of increased vulnerability,” it concluded.

But that wasn’t the problem – in fact, it was the opposite of it. The problem was the refusal of the DWP – and others – to engage with Errol Graham.

In response to the report’s publication earlier this week, the DWP said it acknowledged that the government department had improved its processes since Mr Graham’s death.

But that was based on false information, because the DWP had not been honest with the Safeguarding Board. In fact, one might say it had refused to engage properly.

I wonder how the DWP will respond if the report is changed and a much more negative verdict is returned.

Source: Chances were missed to save man who starved in Nottingham, report finds | Welfare | The Guardian


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Tory benefit changes mean around 1m people may be forced into work they can’t do

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

The Tories are bringing this nightmare back again.

Jeremy Hunt’s Budget announcement that he is ending the Work Capability Assessment has turned out not to be the relief so many benefit claimants with long-term illnesses thought it would be.

He is ending the Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity element of Universal Credit, meaning that people who received it may now have to seek work under the new Personal Independence Payment system.

They’ll need to claim the new UC health element, and to do that they must also be eligible for Personal Independence Payment – and under this system they may also be required to seek work or accept job offers.

Additionally, assessments will now be carried out by work coaches from the Department for Work and Pensions, rather than the (so-called) health professionals who currently carry out the much-maligned WCAs.

There are fears that these civil servants will not have the proper training to identify claimants’ conditions and needs, and may be set target numbers of people they have to try to force into work, which they will impose on disabled people.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank has estimated that a million people could be forced into work and 600,000 could lose an estimated £350 per month in support as a result of the change.

Hunt has been up-front about the intention behind the change: it’s to push people into work who would not otherwise have sought it.

The problem is that it may push people into work who simply cannot do it.

Experience has shown us what happens when the government forces people with long-term illnesses and disabilities to seek work:

They are rejected by employers – or find that they simply cannot do the work. Unsuitable for employment, and unable to claim benefits, they either starve to death or die of their health conditions.

We have seen it before – many times, in the years since the Tories came back into office in 2010.

It is scandalous that Jeremy Hunt is talking up a change that may make unendurable the lives of people who are already among the UK’s most vulnerable.

Source: Disability benefit changes: ‘My disability means I cannot work but I worry I’ll be forced to by the new rules’


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Hunt’s disability plans put a million people at risk of losing £350 a month | The Guardian

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

At last it seems we get the facts about the plan to ditch the Work Capability Assessment for people with long-term illnesses – and it isn’t pretty.

It seems an inferior test, for PIP (Personal Independence Payment) will be used instead and up to a million people will lose a lot of money:

Up to 1 million people claiming incapacity benefits could lose hundreds of pounds a month as a result of plans outlined in the budget to push ahead with the “biggest reforms to the welfare system in a decade,” experts have said.

The warning came as ministers unveiled a range of measures to try to drive more people back into the workplace, including scrapping controversial “fit for work” tests for disabled claimants and stepping up the threat of benefit curbs against part-time workers.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said up to 1 million people currently on incapacity benefits could lose about £350 a month as a result of dropping the work capability assessment (WCA), which assesses capacity for work, and using the personal independence payment (Pip) test, which measures only the extra living costs of disability.

It said the logic of the plan meant those who had conditions that prevented them working – such as people with short-term or fluctuating illnesses – but who did not claim Pip, or incur major additional living costs, would no longer receive extra support. Pip tests are widely distrusted and currently take 14 weeks to process.

Source: Hunt’s disability plans put 1 million people at risk of losing £350 a month, IFS says | Disability | The Guardian


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Work Capability Assessment to be scrapped for benefit claimants. But what will replace it?

Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?

I should be pleased.

This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.

In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.

In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.

That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.

And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.

I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.

Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.

Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.

And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.

But we’re not being told what will replace it.

This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:

Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.

James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.

“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”

Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.

And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.

I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.

DWP won’t contact over 100,000 ESA claimants owed millions in compensation

This comes courtesy of Benefits and Work; This Site is just passing it on:

The DWP has refused to follow a recommendation by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) to contact over 100,000 ESA claimants who are owed compensation totalling many millions for DWP errors. However, one claimant has been awarded £7,500 in compensation and we explain below how you can begin a claim if you were affected.

The issue relates to mistakes made by the DWP which began over a decade ago.

In 2011 the DWP began transferring claimants from incapacity benefit to employment and support allowance (ESA). However, in many thousands of cases the DWP only assessed claimants for contribution based ESA and failed to check whether they should also have been awarded income-based ESA.

Eventually, after many complaints and awards to claimants who had missed out, the DWP reluctantly launched a LEAP exercise to identify claimants who had been victims of their error.

This resulted in 118,000 claimants getting backdated awards of ESA, in many cases amounting to thousands of pounds. Others also got awards outside of the LEAP scheme.

However, these claimants were not told that they might also be entitled to special payments because they had missed out on other benefits or undergone hardship as a result of the DWP’s maladministration.

Indeed, the DWP specifically told claimants that they could not complain to the Independent Case Examiner and did not tell them about the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO).

However, one claimant – known as Ms U – had advice from a welfare rights worker. As a result, she did complain the PHSO after the DWP refused to pay her compensation in addition to £19, 832 in backdated ESA.

The PHSO found that Ms U had suffered considerable hardship and her health had suffered as a result of the DWP’s failures. She had also missed out on free prescriptions, warm home discount payments and other help such as paying for a washing machine.

The PHSO recommended that the DWP pay Ms U £7,500 as compensation and also pay interest on the back payment of ESA.

The DWP paid Ms U, but refused to follow another recommendation of the PHSO.

This was that they contact claimants both within the LEAP exercise and outside it who had been given ESA arrears due to their maladministration, look into their circumstances and award them any appropriate compensation.

Instead the DWP argued that: “should a claimant feel that they should receive compensation due to their individual circumstances, they can contact the Department and set out their reasons. All requests received will be considered on a case by case basis.”

The DWP know very well that almost none of the affected claimants will ever discover that they might be entitled to compensation and thus they will never know to ask for it.

In a recently released letter dated 10 May 2022, the PHSO said that they were “extremely disappointed” with the DWP’s decision not to follow their recommendations.

Unfortunately the PHSO has no power to force the DWP to do so.

We know that only a small proportion of Benefits and Work readers will have been affected by this issue.

But if you are one of them, we have a downloadable letter, complete with instructions, that you can use to begin the process of applying for compensation.

It comes with no guarantees that it will work, but waiting for the DWP to act seems to guarantee that you will not get a penny of what you may be owed.

If you are not personally affected but know someone who may be, please send them a link to this article.

And if you regularly post in a forum or belong to a group that might include affected people, again please give them a link to this page.

Who is affected

Affected claimants are those who were transferred from incapacity benefit to ESA, a process that began as far back as 2011, and who later received a lump sum payment of arrears because the DWP had failed to award you income-based ESA as well as contribution-based ESA.

Many claimants who received such a lump sum will have missed out on passporting to other benefits, such as free prescriptions and warm home discount payments.

What you can do

If you think you were affected you can write to the office which administers, or used to administer, your claim for ESA to ask for compensation.

We have created a simple, downloadable letter which you can use as the basis for your own.

We have kept this letter as simple as possible, with instructions for you in italics. If you know the dates of any award of back-dated ESA or the amounts that you may have missed out on then by all means add them. But, at this point, the most important thing is to begin your claim.

If you don’t receive a reply, do as the letter says and make a formal complaint as well as contacting your MP’s office and asking them to pursue the matter

Download the letter in rich text format

Download the letter as a .pdf

You can read the PHSO’s original findings on the case of Ms U here

You can read the correspondence between the PHSO and the DWP here

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Way NOT to Work; it’s claimed Boris Johnson’s flagship jobs scheme was rubbish

Boris Johnson: has he been lying AGAIN?

It seems a scheme launched by Boris Johnson to force people into work by cutting their benefits after four weeks actually saw fewer people into jobs than the average.

The target set for the Way to Work scheme was to get 500,000 people into jobs, and the Department for Work and Pensions made a huge “We did it!” announcement five months after the scheme was launched in January.

But this seems to be untrue:

Figures from the Office for National Statistics released last week show that the number of unemployed people finding work actually fell by 148,000 compared with the six months before Way to Work began, despite record numbers of job vacancies.

The government is also facing questions about why it set a target of 500,000 when, on average, nearly 1 million unemployed people have found work during similar periods each year since 2001.

At the end of January, Johnson announced that a “Way to Work drive” would help 500,000 into employment from Universal Credit intensive work search or jobseeker’s allowance, at a time when there were a record 1.2 million vacancies.

Analysis by the Observer of seasonally adjusted figures from the ONS Labour Force Survey shows that 867,310 people moved from unemployment to employment from January to June, with the majority of them finding work before March. In the previous six months, 1,015,954 people moved into work. The average figure for January to June since records began in 2001 is 948,000.

The DWP has doubled down, claiming that Way to Work did successfully support half a million people into work.

A spokesperson said there had been fewer unemployed people overall in the labour market, so the amount of people moving from unemployed to employed was understandably lower.

But the Office for Statistics Regulation has warned that there is no clear explanation of how the Way to Work target was defined, how it would be measured, and the methods used to support claims that the target had been reached.

It said measuring government programmes in a robust and transparent way is important, and the statistics and data underpinning any measurement should uphold principles of being trustworthy, of high quality and offer public value – but the way the Department has communicated information in this case does not uphold these principles.

Stephen Timms, Labour chair of the work and pensions select committee, was quoted by The Guardian, saying the committee would be looking at the figures as part of an inquiry when MPs return in the autumn.

“The refusal to set out the evidence behind the claim, unfortunately, is par for the course at the moment… To claim that their policy has been a success seems like business as usual. There might be something more that we’re missing. If there is, they need to tell us what it is.”

It seems that, even though he is quitting as prime minister, Boris Johnson’s falsehoods will continue to plague us for some time to come.

Source: Boris Johnson’s flagship jobs scheme was a failure, new figures reveal

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Brexit-caused employment problems leave firms struggling to fill vacancies

Not working: okay, it isn’t quite the right image – unless you think of the trucks all being full of migrant workers returning to their countries of origin – but the message that “Brexit isn’t working” is supported very strongly by the findings listed in the article.

Are these results of Brexit the “sunlit uplands” we were told to expect in the UK economy after leaving the European Union?

Brexit has exacerbated the UK’s labour shortages over the past year, with industries most reliant on freedom of movement hit hard, according to a report led by academics from Oxford university.

The research found that in parts of the economy such as hospitality and corporate support services there had been large declines in the number of EU workers, a substantial rise in vacancies and few opportunities for employers to recruit from non-EU countries.

The academics found no evidence that employers had responded by raising wages to attract UK-born workers to fill the roles previously occupied by people born in the bloc.

So low-wage industries are having trouble recruiting, and won’t increase wages to relieve that pressure.

But increasing the number of visas available to get people from foreign countries back into jobs here won’t work, it seems, because they are difficlt to police and may open workers to exploitation and abuse.

The Tory government – via the Home Office – has stuck its head in the sand, as usual.

It has said employers should look to the domestic labour market rather than foreign recruitment, incentivising people to take jobs with higher wages, training and career options.

But employers have clearly decided not to even try. What’s ‘Plan B’?

Source: Brexit intensifies labour shortages as companies struggle to hire

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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The Tory Bill for workers’ rights – just another Boris Johnson lie?

The Tory two-fingered salute: this time it’s for working people across the UK who thought the lying Boris Johnson was ever going to offer them a fair deal.

Simple answer: it’s what they do.

Unions and industry groups were incensed earlier this week when they discovered that the Tory government has not included an Employment Bill to protect workers’ rights in plans for the new Parliamentary session.

Why were they so upset?

Because the Tories had promised it, that’s why!

Boris Johnson had responded to concerns that workers’ rights could be watered down after the UK left the EU, and worries about treatment of employees in the gig economy with a pledge to enshrine rights in law. That was in 2019.

Since then, nothing.

According to the BBC,

When first announced, the bill had promised:

  • the creation of a single enforcement body, offering greater protections for workers
  • making sure that tips left for workers go to them in full
  • all workers would have the right to ask for a more predictable contract
  • redundancy protections would be extended to prevent pregnancy and maternity discrimination
  • parents allowed to take extended leave for neonatal care
  • entitlement to one week’s leave for unpaid carers
  • subject to consultation, the bill also proposed making flexible working the default unless employers have good reason not to.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said the lack of the Employment Bill in Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech meant “vital rights that ministers had promised – like default flexible working, fair tips and protection from pregnancy discrimination – risk being ditched for good”.

She claimed ministers had “sent a signal that they are happy for rogue employers to ride roughshod over workers’ rights,” adding it would see “bad bosses celebrating”.

She’s not wrong!

But then, working people and their representatives were wrong ever to believe that Boris Johnson and his gang of asset-strippers and exploiters would ever legislate to ensure proper treatment for them.

In short, it seems clear that the promise of an Employment Bill was another Boris Johnson lie. We should have treated it as such from the start.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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