Meet Andy Burnham's 'Minister for the Future of Work'
Kate Dearden wants to take Britain back to the future
If Labour’s Employment Rights Act hasn’t already done enough damage, Andy Burnham has made a former trade union official his “Minister for the Future of Work”.
Kate Dearden has no experience outside of politics. Just 32 years old, her pre-parliamentary career consisted of a brief spell as a Labour Party campaigns officer and seven years as a researcher at the Community trade union.
Her knowledge of private business, technology and AI must be hard to replicate.
I jest, but a cursory glance at Dearden’s record shows that her ideas are far from a laughing matter.
In 2023, while working at Community, she worked on the Fabian Society’s manifesto for the self-employed – a wishlist of spending commitments to make taxpayers baulk.
It called for increasing Jobseeker’s Allowance “to the level of statutory sick pay” – a rise of nearly 30 per cent – before replacing it with “unemployment insurance worth at least 50 per cent of their previous earnings”.
Paid maternity leave would be extended to 12 months. And not content with paying people more when they lost their jobs, the manifesto proposed introducing “earnings-related sickness insurance”.
Handily, the Fabians have told us what this would all cost: £3bn for sickness insurance, £1.8bn for unemployment insurance and more than £3bn for increased maternity and parental support.
Its complete employment-insurance package would have cost £9.3bn. But don’t worry, they had a plan for you to pay for it: a 0.7 percentage-point rise in National Insurance for workers and employers alike.
Less money in your pocket and a tax on every job – a very Labour recipe for economic growth.
Of course, the unions would also get their cut.
Employers would be required “to forward trade unions’ electronic communications to their workforces” and “provide a digital notice board that can be accessed by all workers on which trade unions’ materials can be displayed.”
Gig-economy platforms would be compelled to “interoperate and share worker data” with digital organising platforms, including those operated by unions.
Employers aren’t being asked to tolerate a few leaflets in the staffroom. Dearden’s proposals amount to turning private businesses into recruiting tools for organised labour.
The Employment Rights Act has already spooked employers. Even the Government’s own analysis estimates that it will impose £1bn of extra costs per year on businesses.
In May, nearly nine in ten business leaders said the Act would harm growth, while 63 per cent said it made them less likely to hire.
Yet Dearden signed up for going further still through higher taxes, higher benefits, more union power and greater burdens on businesses.
This is not the “future of work”. It is 1970s corporatism dressed in new clothes.
Burnham and his team are taking Britain back to the future and the consequences will be disastrous.