TUC welcomes Labour proposals for Race Equality Act

The TUC has welcomed the Labour Party’s announcement of a new Race Equality Act, which proposes to extend equal pay rights to Black, Asian, and minority ethnic workers.

The new Act would impose a duty on public services, including the NHS, police, schools, and councils, to collect and report data on staffing, pay and outcomes by ethnicity.

The proposed legislation would also cover disabled people, treating equal pay claims based on ethnicity and disability on a par with existing protections for women.

TUC general secretary, Paul Nowak called the proposed duty on employers to report their ethnicity pay gaps, a “welcome step forward for BME workers”, saying that “structural racism in our jobs market means that too many black and minority ethnic workers are trapped in low-paid jobs, with limited rights and precious little opportunity for progression”.

Labour’s proposal to introduce mandatory disability pay gap reporting was also welcomed. TUC analysis published last November showed the pay gap between non-disabled and disabled workers was 14.6% — higher than it was a decade ago.  

Nowak warned that “without this long overdue legislation, millions of disabled workers will be consigned to many more years of lower pay and in-work poverty”.

He said the new legislation “would help shine a light on this inequality and set about resolving it”.