There will be plenty of fraught conversations in the months ahead. Despite a strong economic rebound following last year’s recession, Nowak said that Sir Keir Starmer has “inherited an absolute economic mess” and “nobody has rose-tinted specs thinking they can fix the country’s problems overnight”.
Some question whether Labour can truly fix the country’s problems at all. Lord Peter Mandelson, who helped Labour sweep to power in the 1990s, last week warned that it wasn’t the hard Left he was worried about but “something potentially worse. Softness. Compromise. Fudge”.
There have long been fears that Labour’s pledge to be both pro-business and pro-worker is impossible to achieve and will leave both sides unhappy.
In the run-up to the election, union insiders said they felt blindsided because the wording of Labour’s workers’ rights package did not match the demands they made during a marathon five-hour meeting aimed at preventing the policies from being watered down.
Unite, Labour’s biggest union donor, has argued that the revised document had “more holes in it than Swiss cheese”. On the other side, an employers’ group last week claimed that Labour’s plans to give workers a right to switch off threatens to create a “playground for ambulance chasers”.
Nowak does not fear there will be too much compromise. “That’s not my worry,” he said, adding that unions will ensure all the promises Labour have made to workers are “delivered in full”. He added that overhauling workers’ rights doesn’t involve a huge amount of money but sends out a clear signal to bad bosses.
“I don’t see any contradiction at all about giving people job security, decent pay, good employment rights and having a successful, competitive economy,” he said.
Part of his confidence stems from a trip to Spain at the end of 2022, when Nowak went on a “fact-finding” mission with Labour politicians including then-shadow employment minister Justin Madders to figure out how the country’s socialist government brought unions and employers together on transforming workers’ rights.
Nowak said: “What we saw there was a government that went into an election saying ‘we are going to regulate the gig economy’, and of course they were talking to the gig economy employers about how that was going to happen but they weren’t giving them a veto.
“I expect some of the backwoodsmen in the employer organisations to come out and say there’s no way we can live with ‘day one’ employment rights, and I hope and expect Labour will face them down.”
Unions expect to be at the forefront of policy decisions over the coming months, leading some businesses to fear that there could be a push for more extreme, Corbyn-era ideas.
There is an expectation that Sir Keir will rehash some policies from Jeremy Corbyn’s infamous 2017 manifesto, such as making it easier for unions to carry out strike ballots. Would Nowak have preferred to see Corbyn as leader?
“No, you deal with the government you’ve got,” he said. “I’m not really interested in playing top trumps on who should be in the cabinet and who should be leader and what decisions should be made. What I’m interested in is a Labour prime minister who will drive positive change.”
