UK government escalates deregulation as corporations cut pay and conditions
The British government’s post-Brexit deregulation agenda is accelerating. The closing of the freeport (free trade zone) bidding process and the government’s recent recalibration of its plans for workers’ employment rights, followed quickly by an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade agreement, signals an intensified class war policy.
Margaret Thatcher’s former Chancellor Nigel Lawson spelled out the post-Brexit agenda in 2016. Her economic transformation, he wrote, “was done by a thoroughgoing programme of supply side reform, of which judicious deregulation was a critically important part,” but this was now “bound by a growing corpus of [European Union] regulation.”
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has called for the protection of fundamental human rights, job security, and other occupational privileges for domestic workers to improve their general wellbeing and secure their future.
According to Mr Eric Amoadu Boateng, the Head of Organizing Department of TUC, the nation’s informal sector including; domestic workers employed about 71 percent of the country’s labour force, and the sector contributed significantly to the economic development of the nation.
Therefore protecting their general welfare remains paramount to the holistic economic augmentation, he added.
Mr Boateng was speaking at a domestic workers sensitization forum organized by Action Aid Ghana, an NGO, at Sunyani for traders, artisans, market women, caterers, Porters, spare parts dealers, street vendors, and househelps.
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Mr. Timipre Sylva, has asked Nigerians to ready to endure the pain of another hike in the price of premium motor spirit, popularly called petrol, even as the country is also set to benefit from the rise in price of crude oil in the international market.