The bosses are writing Labour’s policy on employment and Starmer is ditching his commitment to ban fire and rehire, writes John Westmoreland

The Labour Party’s entire history confirms what Lenin said of it back in 1920, when he explained that Labour was not the political expression of workers in trade unions:

‘The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois [capitalist] party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers.’

The ongoing row between Unite’s Sharon Graham and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves concerning Labour’s backtracking on fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts completely justifies Lenin’s analysis. Labour is out to dupe the workers: get their votes and forget their rights. The only thing that might have changed since Lenin’s time is that Starmer’s Labour is unashamedly a party of business these days, with Starmer boasting that the bosses are now looking to Labour to boost economic growth.

A ‘bad bosses’ charter’

Less than two weeks ago, Labour’s frontbench team met trade-union leaders to quell their concerns that Labour was watering down its commitment to workers’ rights. The joint statement at the end of the talks was all about a shared agenda, but concealed the fact that the union leaders had won nothing. Since then, the watering down is looking more like a complete rinsing.

What was then Labour’s New Deal for Working People has now become Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering a New Deal for Working People. The word ‘plan’ is a clear move away from commitment. Legislation will be introduced at some point in the future. It is also a handy inclusion that allows Labour’s media team to rebuff Sunak’s claim that Labour has no plan. And the plan to ‘make work pay’ is a deliberate use of a Tory soundbite. When David Cameron launched the great benefits heist in 2011, known to history as Universal Credit, he did it under the banner of ‘make work pay’.

Sharon Graham, Unite’s General Secretary, is absolutely right in calling this shabby con trick a ‘bad bosses’ charter’ with so many caveats and get-out clauses that it has ‘more holes than Swiss cheese’. Graham is incensed that Rachel Reeves has diluted Labour’s promise to end fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts. These practices destroy workers’ rights and allow employers to behave like gangsters. They represent an attack on basic human rights and their widespread use under the Tories should already have been met with a determined trade-union campaign.

While trade-union leaders are fobbed off with weasel words and vague promises, the New Deal is being revised and reformulated through discussions with the employers. The Financial Times has reported that the terms of the Deal are being altered to ‘quell business unease’. What about the unease of workers whose lives have been devastated by insecure employment and poverty pay like the 800 P&O workers dismissed with one hour’s notice in 2022?

Rachel Reeves is ramping up her commitment to being a business-friendly Chancellor. She never stops repeating the phrase ‘changed Labour Party’ and boasting of her work as an economist for the Bank of England. Reeves has rowed back on the commitment to end fire and rehire. She has tweeted: ‘It is important that businesses can restructure to remain viable and preserve their workforce when there is genuinely no alternative.’ This is a green light for bosses to continue exploiting the worst employment rights in Europe. All they have to say is that there is no alternative: something they have been saying for years.

Reeves’ commitment to business means any pledges concerning workers’ rights are not worth the paper on which they are written. Reeves has not pledged to ban zero-hours contracts as Angela Rayner did, when the New Deal was first launched. And workers are also going to be denied the right to ‘switch off’ outside working hours, meaning employers will be able to email workers off sick or in their leisure hours, and expect an answer.

Rank-and-file leadership urgently needed

Sharon Graham has cultivated the image of herself as a leader who will support industrial action called by Unite members. The outright betrayal of the New Deal by Starmer has put her in a fix. On the one hand, she rightly calls the betrayal out for what it is, but on the other hand, she can do little beyond sounding off. She doesn’t want to damage seriously the chances of a Labour victory, and she hasn’t, so far, been prepared to break the anti-trade-union laws.

Therefore, when Graham says of fire and rehire that ‘we are not having it’, we can’t take this at face value. Maintaining her credibility and committing to using industrial action to confront a Labour government are two very different things.

Furthermore, other trade-union leaders are happy to ignore Labour’s betrayal.  Unison, which along with Unite is one of the two largest unions in the UK, welcomed the package in its current form as one that will ‘make work fairer and boost the economy’. Unison General Secretary Christina McAnea said:

‘There will be a clear choice in July: a vote for a party that understands the huge struggles employees and their families have been facing, or one that’s persistently let working people down these past 14 years. Labour’s new deal best illustrates that choice.’

For the working class generally, and trade unionists in particular, we can’t leave our future in the hands of a servile Starmer government, nor a layer of trade-union bureaucrats unwilling to fight for real change.

We can agree wholeheartedly with Sharon Graham’s view that fire and rehire is non-negotiable and has to go. Rights for workers are, after all, just that. If our rights can be taken away whenever the bosses want, they are not rights at all. And, we desperately need the right to live a life that isn’t insecure, fearful and alienated. This is a commitment to which only the rank and file of the movement can commit.

Labour, as Lenin said, is a capitalist party and the trade-union leaders are wedded to it. Betrayal and compromise in favour of the capitalists are the two dominant features of the British Labour movement. The need for a rank-and-file movement has never been clearer.