Keir! - In a round of media interviews on 5 May, you were asked about the government's plans for easing the lockdown and bringing workers back to work. While you mentioned that trade unions (“and businesses”, you were sure to add) have concerns about workplace safety, and pressed for the government to be “less vague”, you declined to take a firm stand in favour of workers' rights.
Specifically, in this case, you declined to uphold the right not to have to work in unsafe conditions, even though that is actually a right in existing law ("Section 44"), and has been used in this emergency many times, and successfully, by workers.
You declined to support the consensus now developing across the labour movement for opposing any returns to work or increase in services in conditions in which workers' representatives have not had oversight over the implementation of adequate safety measures in the workplace. Asked if you would support workers who refused to work on the grounds of safety, you declined.
We do want the government to be clearer, and we do want national standards and agreements imposed, legally binding on all workplaces, around safety measures that must be in place in order to facilitate phased returns of workers into the workplace, or stepping up of services. But rather than simply suggesting that the government be “less vague”, you and the Labour Party must be articulating independent demands and policies, and fighting for them. Basic standards could include:
• Distancing measures in every workplace, including rotating shift patterns and reduced working weeks, with no loss of pay, to ensure numbers in the workplace don't exceed levels at which it's possible to distance safely
• Handwashing stations throughout the workplace
• Adequate provision of PPE, including masks, wherever necessary
The core principle the labour movement, including the Labour Party, must advance is workers' control: the maximum degree of direct oversight over and sign-off of workplace safety measures by elected union representatives and committees.
For the most part, our bosses could continue to work from home indefinitely with little to no impact on the functioning of our workplaces. It is us, frontline workers, whose labour will power any resumption. We should decide when and how it's safe to go back to work.
Already, employers, including transport providers, are lobbying for distancing guidance to be revised to ease restrictions on their ability to generate profit. Will you take a clear stand against this? Will you support us and our unions' demands to put health before wealth? Workers in numerous industries and sectors have already taken action – all of it “unofficial” because of Britain's restrictive anti-union laws – to defend and extend workplace safety. Do you support that action? Will you support us when we act again?
You were elected leader of the Labour Party, on a landslide, on a platform of pledges promising “economic justice” and “strengthening workers' and trade union rights”. Where are those pledges now? Why have you settled, almost immediately, into a stance of “constructive engagement” with this hard-right Tory government? “Scrutiny” is not enough: we need opposition.
This is not a plea for “help”. Ultimately it is our own organisation and direct action in our workplaces that will be decisive. It is a demand that you support us. You are the leader of the Labour Party, the party founded to speak up in official politics for the independent interests of the organised working class.
If the party under your leadership is to fulfil that role, even in the most limited sense, you must speak up for workers' rights, including our right to take action to win safer workplaces.
Ruth Cashman, Lambeth Unison activist and Secretary
