Union leaders have warned business groups against pushing Labour leader’s Keir Starmer to water down the party’s plans to introduce sweeping reforms of workers’ rights and a ban on zero-hours contracts, reports The Guardian. As the Labour leader comes under pressure from industry to scale back its shake-up of employment laws, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) said the plans were ‘extremely popular’ with voters and good for the economy. Calling on employers to “get on board” with Labour’s plans, the unions’ umbrella body published analysis showing as many as two-thirds of workers on zero-hours contracts had been with their current employer for more than a year.

It said that this showed the overwhelming majority of workers on the contracts are “stuck” in a position of insecure employment, which was leading to bad employers “parking workers on zero-hours contracts for years on end”. It found a minority of zero-hours contract workers were on them as a stopgap, temporary measure. Labour has pledged to ban zero-hours contracts, end fire-and-rehire practices and introduce “day-one” employment rights as part of a “new deal for working people” within the first 100 days of taking office. Recent polling carried out on behalf of the union body in the autumn showed almost two-thirds of UK adults support a ban on zero-hours contracts, including 60% of 2019 Conservative voters.