Happy Holidays, ASLEF

Christmas and New Year are a holiday season. For two days, the 25th and 26th of December, we enjoy an extra weekend, always granted on those days no matter where it falls in the week, so secure that even when those days fall on Saturday and Sunday, you get an extra two days off Monday and Tuesday.

But then, there are essential services, where people have to work – medical staff, care staff, other less visible services. We’d agree – right? – that someone who works on Christmas Day to provide essential services ought be compensated for it, that someone who works on Boxing Day should be earning a bit extra, that even if they’re getting an extra day’s leave to make up for the day they’re working, they ought also to get more pay for working a day when there’s a reduced shift, when most people are getting to relax with their families and friends.

And we’d agree – right? – that short of emergency, there ought to be an element of choice. If someone’s got to work on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, it ought to be because they’ve chosen to give up their holiday in favour of the extra pay. Everyone’s got a right to work, to be treated as a free worker, not as a machine.

Our constitution, July 2012: Economic rights

The previous constitutional posts have been based on a short list of things pretty much everyone agrees you should have in a functioning modern democracy. Politicians in government (or with hopes of being in government soon) may be less enthusiastic about some of the provisions, which are explicitly intended to restrict their power. But most of them are provisions that even the UK’s unwritten Constitution allows for and that even governments with a thundering huge majority will think carefully before overturning.

What follows is a series of ideas that would

“create a constitutional order that reflects a broad public commitment to a more inclusive, egalitarian, and communitarian way, and to mark Scotland out as a ‘progressive beacon’, the following additional provisions might be considered:”

1. Enhanced constitutional rights

Beginning with the most commonplace:

(a) Economic rights (minimum wage, right to collective bargaining)

Cait Reilly has received widespread ridicule from the right-wing press (and Iain Duncan Smith called her “snooty”) for saying her human rights were breached by being forced to work for her benefits in Poundland: I don’t know who first referred to this as “slave labour”, which is banned by Article Four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we can agree that being required to work 30 hours a week for £2.30 an hour may be illegal, but it is not literally slavery.

Articles 23-25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, were clearly breached:

Article 23: (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.