Received from: Unite
The government is determined to drive down people’s pay and working conditions, enabling employers to continue using ‘fire and rehire’ when they have the power to outlaw it and to strengthen our employment protections.
An escalating number of employers across all sectors are using our weak employment protections to fire and rehire; one in 10 workers have experienced fire and rehire, with BME workers hit hardest. And a quarter of all workers have experienced a worsening of their terms and conditions – including a pay cut – since the pandemic began.
Even before the pandemic one in nine workers – 3.8 million people – were already ‘insecure’, without access to basic rights at work. They could be dismissed at will, including those on zero-hour contracts and agency workers. Fire and rehire is an additional insecurity, affecting workers who thought they had secure and regular work and incomes.
Congress believes if we allow practices such as fire and rehire to escalate they will become normalised, undermining all of our pay and working conditions, damaging our society and people’s lives. It will deepen poverty even further and accelerate our obscene wealth inequalities, harming people’s mental health and their ability to plan and build their futures.
Congress calls on the General Council to campaign to:
i. end fire and rehire, including supporting the Private Members’ Bill to deem the practice as unlawful dismissal and support disputes where members face fire and rehire
ii. expose the government for failing to end this practice and the employers who use it.
Unite
Amendment
Insert new paragraph 4:
“Congress expresses its support for all workers who face the threat of
fire and rehire, affirms its solidarity with British Gas workers who led the first national gas strike in 10 years, and resolves that there must be an industrial and a political response that ends the practice for good.”
GMB