Widening inequality, stagnant pay – Britain urgently needs Labour’s hard-won workers’ rights

The British Social Attitudes survey reveals record levels of dissatisfaction. But still Kemi Badenoch and the business lobby want to take us backwards

Britain is unhappier at work than since records began. The British Social Attitudes survey, the nation’s long-running annual pulse-taker, finds growing job dissatisfaction in its report, published today. People complain of a lack of flexibility in working hours, a lack of career advancement – and, of course, a lack of pay rises.

Who is surprised? Pay stagnation over the last decade is unprecedented since Napoleonic times, the economist Paul Johnson told me, but then corrected himself: “You might as well say ever.” Worse, over the last year pay inequality has jumped up for the first time in a decade, says the Resolution Foundation’s Mike Brewer. Pay for the top 10% rose by 7.3% but only by 1.1% for the bottom 10%. Why? The national living wage has stopped rising faster than median pay, and top pay has taken off again.

This gap in pay rises is the highest ever recorded. As ever, the wealth gap is even wider, the top 1% owning more than the whole bottom half. When incomes are rising, people may forget Britain’s extreme inequality, the highest in western Europe, which has never fallen after taking off stratospherically in the 1980s. But in these moribund times, most see no upturn on the horizon. In high-growth 2006, only 25% of people told the BSA survey the government should shrink the gap between rich and poor; now it’s 53%.

Let’s have no more politicians’ pieties about working hard and playing by the rules when “hard-working” people feel under-rewarded, with their expectation of career advancement having fallen from 35% to 26%.

Rags to riches, tea boy to boardroom stories belong to grandparents’ folk memories of the 1950s and 60s, when steep upward mobility, even for early school leavers, came from an escalation in white-collar, admin, skilled and managerial jobs. For the statistics and personal stories of opportunities for the bright but unqualified, see social historian David Kynaston’s phenomenal book Deep into the Sixties.

Alan Sugar, the poster boy for that lost world, was a Hackney market trader who became a billionaire. But look how he sees young people now, accusing them of “a lack of hunger, wanting a quick fix, not wanting to put the graft in and get there through hard work”. His TV series The Apprentice may influence his generation to despise young people, ignorant as they may be of what has changed since their day.

Yet the work ethic is as strong as ever, says Prof John Curtice, editor of this week’s BSA findings. People feel that work matters beyond money: only 4% would choose not to work if they could, and just 2% of young people – they are not feckless and idle.

The world of work has reversed, perversely: young people are more educated, with the exam results to prove it, yet have less chance than their parents of making progress. They are likely to earn and own less. That’s a recipe for social disaster. As job satisfaction falls to its lowest in the BSA survey’s records, “The proportion willing to work harder than required to help their employer succeed has fallen to its lowest-ever level over the past decade.” What to do when improving growth, productivity and pay eludes governments throughout Europe?

Labour’s best hope of easing this national discouragement is by rolling out better working rights now. This flagship policy in its 2024 manifesto brings greater control over hours and increased protection from heavy-handed employers. The BSA finds 61% think it important to be able to decide their own working hours, yet only 31% say they can in their job. That affects everyone, in jobs high and low, anxiously calculating childcare, school drop-off times, counting every £1 in commuting costs from a home chosen as cheaper because it’s further away. A management’s sudden arbitrary edict to return to the office – I came across a case this weekend – upends everything in precariously balanced household finances.

Far stronger rights to request flexible hours or more working from home come in next year, when employers must give highly specific business reasons for refusal, not simply their belief that working from the office is better, in face-to-face consultations where employees can bring a union rep or a fellow worker.

Last Friday new working rights came into force, letting trade union reps visit every workplace to recruit – every KFC and McDonald’s, every care home, every office high and low – to bring employees together to discuss their working lives without fear of reprisal. Joining a union will open up new avenues for employees to resolve their discontents. Banning exploitative zero-hours arrangements and introducing guaranteed contracts, so workers always know their schedule and what they will earn, will remove one extreme of bad employment practice.

Note that despite a cacophony of outrage from business lobbies and Tory commentators, these rights have huge public support, even among Conservative and Reform voters. A YouGov poll for Acas, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, finds 78% of people want flexible working. As ever, the Confederation of British Industry, British Chambers of Commerce and the Institute of Directors warn that more rights mean fewer jobs. And as ever, the Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch turns a tin ear to public opinion, claiming Labour’s rights are “designed to drag Britain back to a world where unions call the shots and employers carry the blame”. By the next election she may regret this pledge: “At the first opportunity, a Conservative government under my leadership will repeal every job-destroying, anti-business, anti-growth measure in this bill …”

No government can protect its people from the vortex in the White House and his economy-killing war, but Andy Burnham gets credit for trying. Thanks to Angela Rayner’s stubborn determination to defend her working-rights reforms against doubters around Keir Starmer, people may see their working lives are improving just when that’s most needed.