THE GREEN PARTY
Welcome to Part 4 in our series of blogs summarising each political party’s pledges on matters effecting employment. Today we are looking at the Green Party’s manifesto.
Set out from page 18, The Green Party’s key pledges are:
- Promoting stay-at-home working by:
- Compelling employers to reimburse low-income, home-based employees for working hours’ heating, electricity and Wi-Fi costs
- Encouraging increased teleconferencing
- Introducing more local work station hubs and more car club schemes.
- Replacing the Universal Credit system with Universal Basic Income (UBI) by 2025:
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- Every adult would be entitled a UBI of £89 per week, regardless of employment status
- The Green Party say that someone earning minimum wage and working 37.5 hours a week would see their income increase by 10 to 15% through UBI
- Increasing the Living Wage to £12 and extending it to workers aged between 16 and 21
- Legislating to ensure that the maximum wage paid to any employee in an organisation would not exceed ten times that paid (pro rata) to the lowest paid worker in the same organisation
- Banning any company bonuses that exceed the annual wage of the lowest paid worker in the organisation
- Requiring all large and medium size companies to carry out equal pay audits
- The Green Party also pledges to ease the process for bringing equal pay claims. However, no further detail is provided on how this would be achieved
- Implementing a 40% quota for women on major company boards
- Providing 35 hours a week of free childcare for all, from the age of nine months. This would include facilities such as on-site crèches and flexible working opportunities for parents
- Establishing a cross-government strategy tasked with tackling ethnic inequalities across various aspects of society, including employment
- Improving rights for workers in the gig economy, namely by ensuring that they receive at least the current minimum wage, have job security, sick leave, holiday pay and pension provisions
- Encouraging employers to adopt four day working weeks with no loss of earnings to staff
- Requiring all employers to legally recognise any union chosen by their workforce to represent them
- Merging National Insurance, Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, Dividend Tax and Income Tax into a single Consolidated Income Tax
- Increase the Employment Allowance to £10,000 (currently £3,000) per year.
To speak to one of our experts on how these proposed changes could affect your business click here.
Look out for our other blogs in this series which detail employment law pledges from the Labour Party, the Conservaties, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party.