Ensuring that people earn more and that their incomes are more predictable will help boost economic growth, according to Labour’s Alison McGovern MP.
The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary told GB News: “We all want a flexible labour market, but at the moment flexibility can too often be on one side.
“If you want people who have been unwell to come back to work and to, crucially, be able to stay in work, then they need to know that if their condition is up and down, that that flexibility will be there to support them.
“That's what the new deal for working people is all about…if you're on a zero hours contract, you simply don't know from one week to the next what you're going to be earning, that is not good for your level of wages.
“It's about dealing with those problems, that we've got to help people to earn more, have more predictable income and that will help our economy get growing again.”
In a discussion with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, she added: “The economy should be growing after coming out of that pandemic, crash and recession.
“We should be growing now and that doesn't seem to be feeding through to the labour market. That's because there's lots of parts of our country where we haven't got enough good jobs.
“The country is still a lot sicker, a lot more unwell than it was some time ago. That's not just about the pandemic, that was happening before the pandemic.
“There are big structural problems in our economy that we really need to deal with and Labour's got a plan for that.”
Asked if Rishi Sunak has a point when he argues that Keir Starmer cannot be trusted on security, she said: “He does not have a point, not on national security.
“If you look at what Ben Wallace has said, the former Defence Secretary, that the armed forces were hollowed out and that's on the Conservatives’ watch.
“…national security is the first duty of us all, so I don't think Rishi Sunak had a point. I think he is clutching at straws here and I wish the General Election would start.
WATCH CLIP ABOVE FOR MORE
