'Industry also wants binding commitments — partly for greater certainty, partly because businesses are made up of people who themselves want to be properly treated'
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has excluded trade unions and scrapped workers’ rights from his India trade deal, leading to fears that the deal will undercut U.K. workers’ rights and efforts to combat climate change.
In a further sign of just how in contempt the Tories hold workers’ rights, the deal means that neither London nor New Delhi can hold the other to their climate, environmental and workers’ rights commitments.
Politico reports that ‘Businesses, unions and NGOs now fear the deal could undercut British firms because Indian firms operate to less stringent and expensive environmental and labour standards.’
Sunak is keen to secure a trade deal with India to showcase why Brexit has been success, with the 13th round of talks on a potential deal continuing in London this week. India would be the biggest country yet to strike a trade agreement with the UK since it left the European Union’s trading system in 2021.
Sunak has previously said that he would not rush an India-UK trade deal, with the British government stating in January 2022 that it remained ‘committed to upholding our high environmental, labour, food safety and animal welfare standards in our trade agreement with India’.
However, he has once again reneged on yet another commitment.
“Industry also wants binding commitments — partly for greater certainty, partly because businesses are made up of people who themselves want to be properly treated and to avoid climate catastrophe,” a senior British businessperson from the services sector briefed on the chapters told Politico.
The TUC has warned that ‘more good jobs could be offshored to exploitative jobs in India’ as a result of the deal.
Rosa Crawford, trade lead at the Trades Union Congress said: “Suppression of trade unions, child labour and forced labour are all widespread in India.
“But the labour chapter that the U.K. government has negotiated cannot be used to clamp down on these abuses and could lead to more good jobs being offshored to exploitative jobs in India.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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