BLACK workers are more than 50 per cent more likely to be employed on exploitative zero-hour contracts than white workers, new TUC analysis reveals.
The union body published the research showing how black workers are bearing the brunt of insecure work today as delegates gather for TUC black workers’ conference.
The analysis also found that nearly four in 10 BME (black and minority ethnic) workers are also at risk of unfair dismissal, due to having been with their employer for less than two years.
Black workers are also overrepresented in four of the five occupations with the highest number of workers on zero-hours contracts.
This is most stark in social care, where one in 15 is employed, compared to one in 50 white workers.
COSY CLUB: Akshata Murty has been appointed a trustee of the V&A by Starmer. Qualifications: being very, very rich — and married to Rishi Sunak
Why is the Labour government so addicted to giving government jobs to Tories when it spent so long trying to oust them? In the hope the favour is returned the next time the Tories return to power, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
THERE has been a small rush of Tory-linked appointments by the Labour government, showing Starmer’s ministers are pretty comfortable working with Conservatives. It all looks like a uniform, centrist “political class” are settling back in power, however we voted.
In March, Science Secretary Peter Kyle made former Tory science minister David Willetts chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office. A Labour science minister giving a government job to a former Tory science minister looks like “one hand washing another,” a political system where the “insiders” just give each other jobs.
At election time, the winning party promises “change,” and claims big ideological differences with the losers for the purpose of the election. After the votes, we get more of the same.
The Regulatory Innovation Office is supposed to stop regulators from getting in the way of new business innovations. Willetts is a veteran Thatcherite, who worked for Thatcher in her policy unit in the 1980s, so trying to reduce regulation is right up his street.
Willetts is an “intellectual” Tory nicknamed “two brains,” although both of these brains have backed policies like the Poll Tax, which are now viewed as disastrous.
Willetts was a firm backer of Thatcher’s policies during the miners’ strike, and as a minister upped students’ university tuition fees to £9,000 a year. If Labour members — or voters — were asked if they wanted Willetts, they would surely say “no.” Which is why they weren’t asked.
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. UK halts aid to UNRWA in Gaza over Israeli allegations that 12 staff from a total of 13,000 were involved in the 7 October 2024 attack on Israel.Keir Starmer says that his Labour Party is intensely relaxed about assaulting the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
(left to right) Health Secretary Wes Streeting, Dr James Marsh, Group Deputy CEO for Epsom and St Helier Hospitals, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and NHS CEO Amanda Pritchard during a visit to Elective Orthopaedic Centre in Epsom, Surrey, January 6, 2025
Labour warned that workers expect better as anger mounts over welfare cuts and public-sector pay
WORKERS expect better, Labour has been warned by the country’s biggest trade union as anger mounts over cruel welfare cuts and public-sector pay.
Protests met Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s address to Unison health conference in Liverpool yesterday, following a sharp rebuke to the government from its general secretary Christina McAnea on Tuesday.
Ms McAnea had thanked the government for taking steps to improve workers’ conditions through the upcoming Employment Rights Bill.
But she said that some of Labour’s decisions, such as stopping winter fuel payments and inflicting “heartless” cuts to welfare, had left her “baffled and speechless.”
“These cuts will place yet more strain on an NHS already creaking at the seams,” she warned.
“They’re counter-productive, will cost more in the long run and are morally wrong.
“The best way to turn the NHS around is by focusing on the workforce.
“There’s simply no route to fixing the NHS that doesn’t first involve sorting health workers’ pay,” which declined in real terms for over a decade under the Tories.
She called Labour’s 2.8 per cent pay rise for workers “ludicrous,” adding that it “won’t encourage experienced staff to stay in the NHS, nor will it be enough to persuade new recruits to join.”
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers during an executive order signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet,” said one environmental lawyer.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed multiple executive orders that aim to boost the coal industry, a move that critics denounced as “reckless” and “breathlessly stupid” even before the orders were officially unveiled.
Among the orders signed Tuesday, Trump directed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to acknowledge the end of a moratorium that had halted new coal leasing on public lands and to prioritize coal leasing and related activities, and also directed U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to determine whether coal used in steel production can be considered a “critical material.” According to Reuters, permitting this classification would pave the way for the administration to use emergency powers to boost production.
Trump also paused environmental regulation imposed under former President Joe Biden that applied to certain coal-burning power plants thereby purportedly “safeguarding the nation’s energy grid and security, and saving coal plants from closure.”
Additionally, one order directed the “Energy Department to develop a process for using emergency powers to prevent unprofitable coal plants from shutting down in order to avert power outages,” according to The New York Times, a move that may face court challenges.
Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at the green group Earthjustice, said Tuesday: “Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet. President Trump’s efforts to rescue failing coal plants and open our lands to destructive mining is another in a series of actions that sacrifices American lives for fossil fuel industry profit. Instead of investing in pollution, we should be leading the way on clean energy.”
“The only way to prop up coal is to deny reality, and the reality is that people no longer rely on coal because it’s expensive, unreliable, and devastating to public health,” said Julie McNamara, an associate policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement on Tuesday.
“Instead of supporting the economy-boosting clean energy transition that maintains widespread public support across the country, President Trump is relentlessly attempting to tear it down.”
Trump has vowed to support what he calls “beautiful, clean coal,” though the industry has been in decline for years. Coal-fired electricity generation has dropped from 38.5% of the country’s generation mix in 2014 to 14.7% in 2024, according to a 2025 factbook from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Coal is also the dirtiest fossil fuel.
The executive order builds on previous moves by the Trump administration. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an effort to rollback a host of EPA regulations, including some that will impact coal producers.
On the first day of his second term, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” intended to help deliver on his campaign pledge to “drill, baby, drill.” That emergency defined energy to include oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal, flowing water, and critical minerals—but it omitted solar and wind.
Reporting earlier Tuesday indicated that Trump would sign an order invoking presidential emergency authority to force coal-fired power plants to stay open.
In a statement released in response to that reporting, Tyson Slocum, energy program director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said: “Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands.”
“Coal kills. In the last two decades, nearly half a million Americans have died from exposure to coal pollution,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the environmental organization the Sierra Club in a statement on earlier on Tuesday, also in response to reports that executive orders were forthcoming.
In another move that generated swift criticism, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate state policies that are aimed at confronting the climate crisis and to take action to stop enforcement of those laws.
According to The Washington Post, it is unclear what authority would the agency would rely on. The order specifically calls out state climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont.
“President Trump’s executive order weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—a campaign to build public support for climate litigation—in a statement on Wednesday.
“This is the fossil fuel industry’s desperation on full display—they’re so afraid of facing evidence of their deception in court that they’ve convinced the president to launch a federal assault on state sovereignty. We are watching corporate capture of government unfold in real time,” DiPaola added.
Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
