The Workers Party recently made a detailed response to the consultation on the Good Jobs Employment Rights Bill. The Party does not wish to simply rehearse its response here but it has a clear bearing on the draft Programme for Government.

Women, young and older workers, disabled people and certain ethnic groups continue to be over-represented in low-paid, part-time work with few opportunities for progression or development. The same groups are also disproportionately represented in insecure forms of employment, such as zero hours contracts, where we know workers are currently more likely to lack basic employment rights and protections.

The draft Programme for Government fails to recognise the impact of a changing world of work which is becoming more digital and automated and that these changes do not affect everyone equally. Casualisation and new developments are likely to adversely affect women, older workers and disabled people who will face increased job insecurity and pay inequality.

The Workers Party believes in a better world for workers. We live in a capitalist society. The violation of workers’ rights across Europe is increasing. There are severe restrictions on the right to organise in trade unions. Trade unionists are faced with obstruction, victimisation and discrimination in their struggle to organise workers. In Northern Ireland we face the reality of a cost of living and housing crisis, people working long hours at minimum or low wages with precarious job security. Workers often lack the right to strike or are unable to access the protection of a trade union and are extraordinarily vulnerable to poverty, mental health problems and homelessness. Inequality, poverty and destitution are the reality of many workers’ lives.

In Northern Ireland the “solution” is cast by the main Stormont parties in terms of privatisation, “flexible” (meaning precarious) employment, foreign direct investment, private finance initiatives, public/private partnership and lowering corporation tax. Northern Ireland is sold to the foreign monopolies as “business friendly”.

This is the project of capital endorsed by the Northern Ireland administration. The continued influence of the European Union, which has championed deregulation, privatisation and the constant and steady erosion of workers’ rights, exists to guarantee undistorted competition in the market and involves dismantling the state sector and promoting the privatisation of industries and services, including essential services such as health, education and water. This is unacceptable and the Workers Party has no confidence that “good jobs” can be secured within such a social and economic system. The Workers Party, while it welcomes progressive change and the introduction of concrete steps that improve the conditions and living standards of the working class and strengthens the ability of workers to have a real say in determining the conditions under which they work (and contributes to this consultation in that spirit), believes that transformative change empowering workers cannot come about, nor can social justice and workers’ rights be guaranteed, in the framework of an exploitative and oppressive capitalist economic system which sees the minority appropriating for themselves the wealth produced by the working class.

It is the view of the Workers Party that the type of change that workers need can only be achieved in a socialist society. A Programme for Government which offers only the bourgeois management of the economy in the interests of a social system based on expropriation and profit cannot meet the needs of working people.