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The writer is an author and broadcaster focused on how we live and work. Her latest book is ‘Working Assumptions’ and she co-hosts The Nowhere Office podcast.
In a word cloud of Labour’s first days in government, “work” would loom large, probably second only to “change”. “Keir Starmer’s work to rebuild the UK begins”, posted the new prime minister on X. “I’m ready to get to work”, wrote Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor.
With work and workplaces undergoing significant global shifts, the rhetoric is designed to show both a rolled-up-sleeves attitude and the importance of rebalancing employment in the new government’s agenda.
Ironically the biggest impediment to success may be failures in the way government itself works: a departmental approach that can treat the issue in siloed isolation from other areas of policy. Now it has control of the levers of power, Labour must figure out how to use them. Moving from a grandiose to a granular mindset will be key.
Labour — as its name implies — believes in work. Its Employment bill, included in the King’s Speech, aims to tackle poor pay and conditions and strengthen worker rights. King Charles noted “a new partnership with both business and working people”.
Labour gets that work is fundamental to the nation’s wellbeing. Its commitments emphasise mental health and skills, with the announcement of Skills England, which will oversee training. Although an AI bill did not feature, this is a government that wants to defend human jobs in an increasingly machine age. We’re unlikely to see Starmer grinning helplessly beside Elon Musk as Rishi Sunak did at the UK-hosted AI Safety Summit, when the tech entrepreneur declared “there will come a point when no job is needed”.
But job creation and protection is a complex dance between government departments. It requires departments from education to business to HMRC to work together to fix issues such as freelancer tax arrangements and childcare so people can get the most out of work.
So far Labour’s approach echoes Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal — the massive job creation and economic stimulus project that responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s — and perhaps the Disney song Heigh-Ho that captures the spirit of work in the same period. Its plan to “make work pay” is even titled Delivering a New Deal for Working People.
At the time of FDR’s New Deal, nearly 25 per cent of the US workforce were unemployed. Today one-fifth of working-age people in the UK — 9mn individuals — are “economically inactive”: not unable to find work, simply not looking because, as Labour believes, work doesn’t pay.
Labour’s plan to merge new National Careers Centres with jobcentres is a good idea to tackle this. The young and the old should be looking for work together; if you don’t know how soul-sapping jobcentres are now, I’ll say simply that they are little changed from those depicted in the 1980s play Boys from the Blackstuff, currently being revived in London’s West End.
Other ways forward might involve looking back: specifically to the 2017 Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. Identifying the platform economy’s impact on work, it warned of “one-sided flexibility” in employment law and recommended that a “dependent contractor” category should apply to workers who had rights but were not employees. Much of Labour’s policy reflects Taylor, although it is unclear what some reforms, including to employment categories affecting gig workers, will look like in practice.
Several departments should reflect on this: education, health, science, transport, housing, business, and of course work. They should not operate independently of each other. The Taylor Review argued for a “British way” of doing good work. If you want grandiosity, that’s a good way to express it. If the UK can balance worker needs with employer imperatives then it will be creating a world-class model.
But delivering good work requires a rigorous reorganisation of who does what, and a reappraisal of where everything “sits” in government. The Department for Business and Trade was called The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy when the Taylor Review was commissioned. It should be renamed again as The Department for Business, Trade and Work.
Our new government is clearly serious when it pledges that “national renewal starts now”. But after rhetoric comes reality. The heavy lifting of silo-busting will underpin its success.
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