Workers Protection & Unemployment in the UK

The UK Government is pushing for a change in the law - MP's will vote within days, on whether to double the unfair dismissal qualifying period from one year to two years.

The government wants to make it easier for bad bosses to sack workers on a whim – creating a hire and fire culture. Particularly badly hit will be young workers. If they are lucky enough to find a job in Coalition Britain, they will then be constantly looking over their shoulder, worried about being sacked when their face doesn’t fit at any time in their first two years.

Next the government will want to go for ‘no fault dismissals’, meaning organisations employing fewer than ten people will be free to sack workers for no good reason. Plans to charge workers for taking a case to a tribunal will also make it harder for employees to make claims.

Together with the coalition’s savage restrictions on entitlement to legal aid, and its snipping away at health and safety protections, this government is taking working Britain back to the dark ages.

Those lucky enough to be working in Britain ought to be seriously worried. Their working lives are about to become more insecure, trade unions need join forces with the unemployed, your members & ordinary workers face the sack more easily thanks to this Tory led government.

Figures out tomorrow (14/3) are expected to confirm the worst youth unemployment figures for nearly 25 years. Keen to conjure up a distraction from the abysmal unemployment figures and the lack of a `compelling narrative’ on the economy, Tory strategists are cooking up a synthetic rage against workers’ rights.

The 1980s recession was a generational disaster and there is a major risk of it happening all over again, Whatever interpretation economists might have, as far as ordinary people are concerned we are already in a double dip recession and young people are clearly one of the groups bearing the brunt of it.

The effects of long-term unemployment are often depressingly long lasting. Those who were out of work for more than a year during the 1980s were more likely to struggle during the current economic crisis and overall tended to earn less than those who got through the decade economically unscathed.

The manner in which this government is making use of the global recession to systematically take apart the four pillars of our society - access to justice, welfare, education and health – is both breathtaking and terrifying.

Respect For the Unemployed & Benefit Claimants