By James Davey
LONDON (Reuters) – Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket group, is “not unduly worried” by the opposition Labour Party’s plan to introduce a new package of workers’ rights if it wins the upcoming election, its boss said on Friday.
Tesco has about 270,000 UK employees, making it Britain’s biggest private sector employer.
Opinion polls say Labour is on course to easily win the July 4 election and end 14 years of Conservative Party rule. It has pledged to introduce legislation for its “New Deal for Working People” within 100 days of taking office.
Proposed measures include banning “exploitative” zero hours contracts, ending so called “fire and rehire” and introducing basic rights including parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal.
Labour also plans to ensure the national minimum wage is a “genuine living wage” with “discriminatory” age bands removed.
“Many of the measures outlined in proposed legislation we’re already ahead of. We don’t have any minimum hour contracts, for example, in our business,” Tesco CEO Ken Murphy told reporters after the group issued a trading update.
“So I’m not unduly worried,” he said.
Murphy said legislation that looks after and protects the rights of workers “is a good thing”, but it needed to stimulate productivity, economic growth and jobs growth.
“We will of course support the government in achieving those three things. Getting that balance right is always the key,” he said.
Murphy said that regardless of which party wins the election what Tesco wanted was “stability and consistency”.
“They are key attributes because they allow businesses to plan and to invest.”
(Reporting by James Davey; editing by Jason Neely)
