Women should know how much their male colleagues earn, Labour pledges

Women would have the right to know how much their male work colleagues earn under a new Labour Party pledge on the economic recovery from the pandemic.

The party will also call on ministers to give all workers the right to flexible working and to switch off from work at home, as well as end the “outdated and sexist assumption” that dad is “at work in the office and mum looking after the kids and doing the housework”.

Boris Johnson has repeatedly said he wants the UK economy to ‘build back better’ after the threat from Covid-19 has passed. But at the G7 summit he appeared to broaden out that ambition, expressing a hope that a post-Covid world would be “more feminine”.

However, Labour warns that inequalities between men and women have been “supercharged” by the pandemic.

The call will be made by Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and shadow secretary of state for Women and Equalities Marsha de Cordova as they launch their ‘Equal Recovery Pledge’, which the party says will promote gender equality at work. It will call on ministers to give women the right to know how much their male “counterparts” earn.

Also included in the pledge will be a call to immediately reinstate the gender pay gap reporting scrapped by Tory ministers, and to introduce ethnicity pay gap reporting.

Other demands include that it becomes illegal to make a pregnant woman or new mother redundant until six months after they return to work. Ministers would also have to publish the number of jobs created by government schemes such as Kickstart, broken down by sex, ethnicity and disability, and review the shared parental leave system.

Party sources said the policies would be implemented by a Labour government.

In a speech to Labour’s women’s conference on Saturday, Ms Rayner will say: “Strengthened rights at work, more control over our lives and a better work-life balance will not only be good for women workers, but a step forward in the fight for gender equality in the workplace too.

“Flexible working is not just working from home, it’s about work fitting around our lives rather than dictating how we live.”

She will add: “The right to flexible working and to disconnect at home will stop women losing out at work or even dropping out of the workforce altogether.”

Ms de Cordova will say the inequalities “cannot be carried through into our post-pandemic world”.

Recent research by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) found that nearly 9 in 10 – or 87 per cent – of workers want to work flexibly in the future. The ability to do so, however, is disproportionately enjoyed by those in higher paid occupations or whose jobs are in London.