Prime minister Liz Truss must ensure the huge long-term costs of measures to address Britain’s energy crisis do not fall on the shoulders of low-paid workers, trade unions have warned.
Frances O’Grady, head of the Trades Union Congress, the UK’s main movement for organised labour, told the Financial Times that Truss’s plans to cap domestic and companies’ energy bills would only be welcome if the costs were shared fairly.
O’Grady’s comments came as Truss finalised a package that could cost more than £100bn to protect households and businesses from soaring energy prices.
The TUC wants the government to expand windfall taxes on oil and gas companies and press ahead with tax rises for companies and the wealthy. It fears that Truss’s plans to fund the energy package through public borrowing while also pushing through large, unfunded tax cuts will worsen the long squeeze on wages in the public sector.
“How you pay for it matters,” said O’Grady ahead of the TUC’s annual congress. “I am seriously worried that this is a return to low-tax, small-state deregulation that will see us caught up in another blizzard of austerity cuts to public services that we all rely on.”
“If this is austerity, the sequel — well, it didn’t go so well last time,” she added.
Following a summer of labour disputes, tensions between the unions and the government are already at boiling point, with many balloting members on industrial action in protest against real-terms pay cuts in the public sector.
Truss has pledged legislation to make it harder for workers to walk out, including by raising the UK’s already high thresholds for ballots on industrial action to pass, vowing last month “not [to] let our country be held to ransom by militant trade unionists”.
She has also promised to review all rights that derive from EU law, including holiday pay and safe limits on working time.
O’Grady warned that “you can’t grow the economy by slashing workers’ rights” and that to do so would be a “major” political miscalculation, pointing to polling showing that a majority of Conservative voters wanted stronger, rather than weaker, workers’ rights.
The survey by polling company GQR Research found that 81 per cent of Tory supporters wanted workers’ rights to be enhanced, while 77 per cent wanted to end “fire and rehire” practices.
It also suggested that more than three-quarters would back the introduction of fair pay agreements setting minimum standards for pay and rights across whole sectors.
“Clearly, there is an appetite to provoke a culture war with workers . . . That has misfired,” said O’Grady, adding that Truss was “attacking the symptoms rather than tackling the causes of why workers feel angry”.
If Truss wanted to win the country’s confidence, it would require “an empathy with the problems that people are facing”, said O’Grady, hitting out at remarks in which Truss accused British workers of a “lack of graft” while chief secretary to the Treasury.
The wages of workers voting for strike action had stagnated or fallen in real terms for a decade, said O’Grady, as top corporate pay and company dividends had shot up. “They feel mugged,” she added.
“Don’t be the P&O prime minister,” O’Grady urged Truss, in a reference to the criticism levelled at the ferry operator after it sacked 800 sailors without notice or consultation in March this year.
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