Policy: Work & Social Justice

Previous: Big changes for schools – led by those who know them best

We will implement a universal basic income. We believe that doing so is vital in the face of onrushing automation and teleoperation, both of which developments in the labour market threaten the sudden need for reskilling of vast numbers of people.

Rather than preparing for an outcome we can’t deliver – the climate crisis means jobs will be hard to produce out of a hat in the next few decades without jeopardising just about everything else – we’d rather ensure that people have the space they need.

And it’s just about time we end precarity. That, too, is why we we will implement a national living wage, which, in combination with the UBI, will ensure a good baseline standard of living for everyone.

That won’t mean that the fight for better workplace rights will just go away, though – which is why we’ll be strengthening the unions with legislation, and by repeal of the Trade Union Act.

We want to revolutionise public services, too, and guarantee a baseline of service for every citizen, which we’re calling “universal basic services” – a network of state-funded socialised services intended to ensure that socially agreed-upon basic needs are always met.

Like having a roof over your head, healthcare, access to education, broadband – all the things you need to live & work. UBS means that national and local government will be committed to ensuring these services are always provided free at the point of use. Did we mention free broadband? Free broadband!

We’re committed to social justice, too. As such, we’re dedicated to enshrining trans rights in British human rights law, as per the findings of a national direct democratic participatory assembly of trans people. It impacts them most; they should determine how it works out. Nothing about you without you is an important mantra to democracy.

We will also decriminalise homelessness and ban hostile architecture – and while we’re on ending hostile things, we’ll also end the hostile environment, with reparations for the wrongs of Empire & justice for Windrush. We will also force the declassification and release of all necessary documentary evidence to ensure the Windrush generation & all those impacted since can have that promised justice at last.

And we’ll revoke those payments given to slave-owning families when Britain banned the transatlantic slave trade; the money from those payments can be, instead, paid to the descendants of those injured by the slave trade, perhaps as a monthly stipend.

We want to implement reforms to pay structures by implementing workplace democracy. We think the public sector is an excellent place to prove the concept. Pay rises for the highest earners should result in pay rises for the lowest earners. Everyone in the public sector should get to regularly vote on the exact gap between highest and lowest

And we think that to encourage media independence and plurality, current workers should collectively own 51% of each media outlet and should have the same democratised pay gap system as we propose for the public sector.

This would also form a vanguard to increasing democracy in the workplace in the years to come.

Next: Justice