Work Security and Wage Justice
The mantra of "flexible working" is meant to help employers retain their best staff and give employees choice about when to work. But the reality for many thousands is they have little choice except low paid work and unsocial hours.
Under Labour, a huge divide has grown between highly paid executives and their workforces. As a step towards tackling poverty, the CPA will continue to act as the Champion of a Living Wage for all workers. We also want a better work and life balance for all, not just the well-off. The hours of work undertaken in the United Kingdom are more than three hours a week greater than the European average. Spiralling housing costs are making matters worse.
It is easy to assume that things cannot change, but it is possible, relatively quickly, to change the work patterns of substantial numbers of people for the better. Working with business organisations, unions and employers forums, the Christian Peoples Alliance will identify ways of overcoming problems related to over-work, so that time is released for people to spend in rest and recreation and in developing relationships, especially with older relatives and with children. Restoring Sunday as a day of rest would be a radical social revolution - slowing the pace of life, tackling the waste of resources and confronting empty consumerism.
The Christian Peoples Alliance will highlight demands on many fathers and mothers who are effectively cut off from their children for much of their childhood and school years by the working and commuting hours to which they are committed by their job. To leave for work before the children are up and to get home after they have gone to bed is a deep grief to tens of thousands of fathers and many mothers. Children experience a deep hunger for the time their parents cannot give them.
The human cost of unsocial hours will be recognised by the restoration of pay and a half or double pay for shift and essential weekend working. In many instances, transferable tax allowances for married couples will also liberate one partner from the need to bring in additional income.
