The Trades Union Congress (TUC) said that Tory failures on labour market enforcement have allowed bad bosses to exploit staff.
UK workers are legally entitled to 28 days’ paid leave for a typical five-day week, with pro-rata entitlement for those who work fewer than five days.
But research by the TUC shows that 1.1 million employees (one in 25 employees) didn’t get a single one of the 28 days’ paid holiday, or equivalent, that they were entitled to last year.
TUC analysis shows these missing weeks add up to £2bn in lost holiday pay – an average of £1,800 per affected employee.
The research shows that black and minority ethnic (BME) staff were the hardest hit – 6% of BME employees did not get any paid holiday last year, compared to 4% of white employees.
Low-paid workers were most at risk of losing their paid holiday entitlement. The jobs with the highest numbers of staff losing out were waiting staff (59,000), care workers and home carers (55,000), and kitchen and catering assistants (50,000).
In addition to holiday pay, the union body says millions of workers are missing out on many other basic employment rights due to a lack of enforcement.
Recent analysis from the Government’s Low Pay Commission found that 365,000 workers are underpaid the minimum wage – more than one in five of all workers on the wage floor.
The TUC says the main reasons people are missing out on paid holiday include workplace cultures where workers fear that requesting paid time off could lead to being treated unfavourably and workers being set unrealistic workloads that do not allow time to take leave.
In other cases, employers deliberately deny holiday requests and ‘manage out’ people’s leave or have not kept up to date with the law.
‘We all deserve a break’
To address this enforcement crisis, the TUC has launched a five-point plan for effective enforcement of employment rights in the UK. The union body says that workers are currently losing out on wages and other key entitlements, while decent employers are undercut by those that don’t meet their legal duties.
The TUC report supports the new Labour Government’s pledge to introduce a Fair Work Agency, bringing together several existing state enforcement bodies.
TUC’s polling of more than 3,000 voters – conducted by Opinium on the day after the election – showed large-scale backing across the political spectrum for Labour’s Fair Work Agency. More than six in 10 (61%) voters supported introducing a single enforcement body to make sure that workers’ rights are properly enforced – with less than one in 10 (8%) against.
Paul Nowak, TUC’s general secretary, said: “We all deserve a break from work to spend time off with our friends and family. But more than a million working people have been deprived of any of the paid leave they are due. And hundreds of thousands more have been denied basic rights like being paid the minimum wage.
“The Conservative Government sat back and let bad employers cheat their staff out of their basic workplace rights. Tory ministers were more concerned about stopping people getting what they were due by introducing anti-union measures than funding enforcement bodies properly.”
