Scrapping workers’ rights ‘tragic’
28th October 2011The Government’s plans to slash employment rights are “tragic and ridiculous” according to Labour’s Baroness Prosser, a past president of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Speaking in a Lords debate on the changing world of employment, Lady Prosser warned ministers against “cutting away” the progress that has been made over the past two decades.
Lady Prosser slammed the Government for slashing educational maintenance allowances, scrapping the future jobs fund and increasing tuition fees, and said the moves were taking the debate in “completely the wrong direction”.
Warning that the country risked “limping along like a second class has-been” in the near future, Lady Prosser called for investment in research, innovation and vocational training.
Opening the debate, she said: “Simply cutting away all the advances that have been made in the last 15 or so years doesn’t fill me, or the great British public, with confidence.
“The idea mooted by the Chancellor and repeated this week by Education Secretary Michael Gove that reducing workers’ employment rights is going to boost jobs would be funny if it were not so tragic and ridiculous.”
Her words were echoed by her party colleague, Lord Monks, general secretary of the TUC from 1993 to 2003, who warned against promoting the country as a centre for “exploitation” and cheap workers.
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