For too long, disabled workers have faced double discrimination. Not only are they less likely to have a paid job but when they do, disabled people earn much less than their non-disabled peers. New analysis published by the TUC shows that disabled workers now earn a fifth (20%) less than non-disabled workers. It means that the pay gap for disabled workers has widened to £3,800 per year – an increase of £800 over the last year. And the gap will almost certainly increase again as the economic impact of Covid-19 hits. Mandatory disability pay gap reporting would mean bosses had to identify and address poor workplace practices that lead to inequality. Without this requirement progress will be too slow and disabled workers will be consigned to many more years of lower pay and unfair barriers to getting jobs and progressing at work. Disabled people deserve more, they need mandatory disability pay gap reporting – they have waited long enough for fair and equal treatment at work. The government must bring in mandatory disability pay gap reporting for all employers with more than 50 employees.

On Monday (23 September) Thomas Cook the world’s oldest travel agency collapsed into administration with the loss of 21,000 jobs (9,000 in the UK alone) and stranding 150,000 holiday makers. The sudden collapse has left many workers desperate and with no income. Staff were due to be paid on Monday (30 September), but will not now be paid after the business went bust. Two years since Monarch Airlines went into administration with the loss of 2,000 jobs, the government has totally failed to learn lessons or bring in new laws which could have saved these jobs. These are not highly paid workers, many were living pay cheque to pay cheque. Given the dreadful stress this has caused to workers, the priority, now that repatriation of stranded travelled is underway, must be for the secretary of state to fast track the payment of workers’ wages.

Belinda Phipps is CEO of We Are With You- she earns around £140,000 per year. Meanwhile, ex-NHS staff working for We Are With You in Wigan and Leigh stand to lose £150,000 during the course of the NHS Agenda for Change three year pay deal (April 2018- April 2021). We will lose an average of £7,870 each during the course of Wigan Council's contract with We Are With You, with some of us losing out on as much as £10,974. This is simply wrong and across five years, will suck £230,000 out of the local economy whilst We Are With You directs funding towards costly rebrands and its London headquarters. We work hard for We Are With You in Wigan and Leigh to ensure that local people recover from addiction, regaining health, self esteem and becoming fully functioning members of our society. We work in this field because we care and because it's rewarding to support recovery, but we deserve to make a decent living. When we transferred over to We Are With You (formerly known as Addaction) from the NHS, we were promised the NHS rate for the job, but We Are With You have gone back on their word. "Supporting people to overcome drug and alcohol addiction is an incredibly tough job and makes a difference for every single one of us in Wigan. "We Are With You’s employees deserve the pay settlement they were promised when they moved from the NHS to We Are With You". Lisa Nandy, Wigan MP We deserve a decent wage for doing what is an important job for our communities. Please sign the petition to support us. #WeAreNotWithYou #KeepYourPayPromise #BelindaFibs #WeWontPayYou

Over 74,000 retail workers lost their jobs during 2018 and so far this year, the rate of store closures and jobs losses has increased dramatically. Usdaw, the shopworkers' union, is calling on the Government to protect the 4.5 million jobs that rely on the success of the retail sector. The scale of store closures we have seen is devastating, not just for the workforce, but also for our communities and town centres. The Government needs to show that it takes retail jobs seriously by listening to and acting on workers’ concerns. Please sign our petition: We call on the Government to take urgent action by adopting an industrial strategy for retail and implementing the following comprehensive and co-ordinated policies: • Review taxation, commercial rents and business rates to ensure a level playing field between ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers and online retailers, providing a new framework that supports local communities and the wider economy. • A minimum wage of £10 per hour for all workers, secure work and investment in skills and training to provide decent pay and job security for retail workers and drive up productivity. • Give retail workers a say over the future of retail and the introduction of new technology, with a designated inclusive body that ensures the Government recognises the crucial role retail has in the UK economy. A copy of Usdaw’s industrial strategy for the Retail Sector is available at www.usdaw.org.uk/industrialstrategy

The proposed changes to rosters will have a detrimental effect on the work life balance of employees. The new rosters will potentially impact on increased childcare costs, travel costs, laundry and food costs.

Boris Johnson is a right wing symbol for attacks on the most vulnerable sections of our society. Unelected, with no mandate equates to a free hand in decimating the Rights of workers, the NHS, the Climate. All our communities are in danger from this.

We are hospital support staff working for Compass in St Helens & Knowsley and Blackpool NHS Trusts. We keep hospitals clean, cook for patients and keep them safe. We are paid over £1000 less per year and have worse terms & conditions than some of our colleagues who do the same jobs. That's why we are standing together for fair pay and fair treatment. #ONENHS, nobody left out.

We, NHS workers and users recognise the hard work domestics do every day to keep the hospital and public safe. We support their fight to keep their jobs in the NHS. When hospital cleaning services are privatised infection rates go up and workers’ pay is cut. We also stand against the hospital’s attempt to make the domestics paid their own nationally agreed NHS pay deal by cutting their bank/overtime hours. Bedford Hospital is targeting its lowest-paid workers, many of whom are migrant women — we believe this is an attack on equality.

I have worked in an Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) branded hotel for 14 years. I’m also a member of Unite the union’s hospitality workers branch. My colleagues and I are overworked and poorly paid. Some of us are bullied and verbally abused on a daily basis by managers working to impossible targets. I’m proud of my union membership. But it’s not something I can openly talk about at work – it’s pretty much a no go area at IHG. So is decent pay, working in a hotel means that we are among some of the lowest paid workers in the UK. Shockingly around 80 per cent of us are paid less than the real living wage, which is £9 an hour/ or £10.55 an hour in London. IHG made $27.4bn last year. It can afford to pay us a wage we can live on. It should also respect my union. In 2009, my employer signed up to the United Nations Global Compact, committing to uphold 10 principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. I actually thought that things would be different because my employer is a signatory to this international UN agreement, but it’s not. After nearly a decade of my union trying to negotiate access to IHG’s London hotels, including Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, we’ve had enough. Unite has now sent a formal complaint to the UN Global Compact. Please support me and my colleagues by signing and sharing this petition. Join us in calling on Keith Barr to work with our union, Unite. It’s only by working together with our union that we can root out low pay, insecure work, bullying and exploitation from IHG hotels in the UK. Tell him also that the UN Global Compact has got to be genuine. Promoting and protecting human rights at work needs to be more than a box ticking exercise. Thank you, John (name changed to protect identity)

I am Roland Zollner, a barrister from Liverpool, who has retired from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). It is now almost a decade since the Government announced swingeing cuts to the CPS, the Courts, legal aid and the entire Criminal Justice System. Real term pay-cuts of up to 42% are pushing lawyers away from criminal law towards more financially rewarding areas of practice. The explosion of digital evidence has put – as one FDA CPS member put it – “an almost intolerable burden on prosecutors”. Yet while disclosure has become more time-consuming since 2010, the budget of the CPS has fallen by 25% in the same period. As a result, 95.7% of prosecutors surveyed by the FDA now think the department does not have enough lawyers to deal with disclosure issues. “Due to many years of underinvestment, our Criminal Justice System is crumbling.” – Christina Blacklaws, President of the Law Society “A properly functioning Criminal Justice System is fundamental to the rule of law. It is a damning indictment of our times that those in power need reminding.” – The Secret Barrister “Our system of justice, which was once held up as world-class, is now very sick. But it would not take much investment to put it right.” – Richard Atkins QC, Chair of the Bar Council Help us put it right: sign the petition.

Every worker deserves fair pay and a secure job. But wage theft is widespread and pushing working people into poverty. Until March 2018, the Government was publishing minimum wage cheats quarterly but has since stopped reporting. And there are already fines when an offence is committed, that could easily be increased. If the Government is serious about the National Minimum Wage, it must do more to enforce it. A new report has found up to 439,000 people were paid less than their legal entitlement in April 2018, equivalent to 23 per cent of all minimum wage workers. And 135,000 people were still paid less than £7.20 an hour, the level at which the National Living Wage had been set in 2016. The Government must do more to tackle wage theft, by naming, shaming and punishing companies that break the rules.

HMRC’s ill-considered office closure plans, which they still euphemistically call ‘Building Our Future’, will have a particularly heavy impact on PCS members working in International House in Ealing. Many members working in the office have been redeployed previously, some several times, before being based at Ealing having therefore already gone through the “torment” of earlier office closures. As a result many Ealing staff do not live in Ealing and this combined with a significant proportion of staff having caring responsibilities and/or disabilities - making it near impossible for them to commute to Stratford. The closure of International House, if the work there is not relocated locally to another premises will mean that HMRC will no longer have a presence in Ealing, leading to a detrimental local socio economic impact in the area, the impact to the local economy could be as much as £1million per year.