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22 hours ago
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A few years ago, the Harvard professor Michael Sandel used an episode in his Radio 4 series The Public Philosopher to discuss perspectives on the value of work. Canvassing the views of a Dagenham audience ranging from low-paid retail employees to white‑collar professionals, Prof Sandel drew two principal conclusions: work was widely viewed as a potential source of self-esteem and communal purpose; but for too many its oppressive reality was one of stress, precarity and a sense of disempowerment.
Some of the bleak consequences of that divide are outlined in the impact assessments accompanying Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill, which is now passing through the House of Lords. In 2022/23, for example, 17.1m working days were lost due to stress, depression or anxiety – equivalent to an estimated £5bn in lost output. Around 2 million employees reported anxiety due to a lack of clarity over the number of hours they will work, or shifts suddenly being changed. A lack of adequate employment protection means that some 4,000 pregnant women and mothers returning from maternity leave lose their jobs each year.
For a Labour government, a commitment to improve everyday life for millions navigating the sharp end of the modern jobs market should come naturally. Measures in Ms Rayner’s bill such as the reform of zero-hours contracts, and better access to sick pay, are a necessary response to what the deputy prime minister has described as an era in which “the good, secure jobs our parents and grandparents could depend on were replaced by low-paid insecure work”. This is a popular agenda with the public, and one that disproportionately benefits workers in communities where 20th-century deindustrialisation hit hardest.
Ms Rayner apart, however, Labour seems ominously reluctant to shout about it, as anaemic growth predictions continue to unnerve the Treasury. Amid persistent speculation that the package may be watered down in response to lobbying by business groups, the political headwinds and noises off are mounting. In its latest report on the UK economy, published to coincide with last week’s spring statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) suggested that greater regulation at the workplace would have “material, and probably net negative, economic impacts on employment, prices and productivity”.
That was a narrow and contestable judgment. Delivering greater security and dignity to the low‑paid will come at an annual cost to employers, estimated in the low billions in the impact assessments. But the wider social and economic benefits are likely to be greater in terms of knock-on effects generated by improved living standards, increased participation in the labour market, and better health and wellbeing outcomes. Pace the OBR, happier employees will also be more productive ones.
For a brief period in the 2010s, Prof Sandel appeared to be making the intellectual weather in Ed Miliband’s Labour party. His defence then of a politics of the common good, against the reductive and dehumanising calculations of the market, is echoed in the vision underlying Ms Rayner’s employment bill. The government has been accused of betraying core centre-left values on issues such as disability benefits and international aid. By forging ahead with the deputy prime minister’s flagship project, it can begin to restore some of that lost faith.
