UNITE has condemned the government’s plan to cap compensation for unfair dismissal.
In a ministerial statement the government has announced plans to introduce a 12-month pay cap on the compensatory award for unfair dismissal. It has already increased the qualifying period for claiming unfair dismissal from one to two years.
‘The truth is that the Coalition is turning ordinary hard-working people into scapegoats for the government’s disastrous handling of the economy.
‘This government is trying to blame our hard-won rights at work for Britain’s economic problems.
Worse rights at work will not prevent a triple-dip recession or create a single job.
‘The government’s systematic attack on workers’ rights makes being a member of a trade union more important than ever before.
‘There is a growing culture of fear and insecurity in workplaces up and down the country. Thousands of jobs have been lost in the past two weeks and the measures the government is trying to introduce would not have saved a single one.’
Unite also welcomed the moves by those peers that showed ‘dissent’ at the committee stage on Wednesday, 16 January, to the government’s amendment to scrap the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB).
If the peers had not spoken up, the amendment would have gone through ‘on the nod’ – but now a vote by the House of Lords on the AWB’s future has to be held at the report stage at the end of February or beginning of March.
Unite national officer for agriculture, Julia Long, said: ‘We applaud the intervention of those peers that did not want a large swathe of the agricultural workforce reduced to poverty wages.’
