Businesses are to be held responsible for the poor working conditions provided by their contractors in a new union drive to improve terms for the lowest paid.

Companies that employ contractors offering poor conditions are to be named and shamed by the T&G as the union tries to tackle what it says is a growing tide of casualisation and poor pay.

Tony Woodley, the T&G general secretary, told The Times: “We will target the people who call the tune so that they can’t say that poor pay and hours is not their responsibility. We will do what we need to do.”

Last year the T&G used the same tactic to improve pay for cleaners in the City of London and in the House of Commons.

Mr Woodley believes that big-name companies are taking advantage of the casualised labour increasingly used by contracting companies to reduce their costs. “We are seeing one of the most unrecordable, unnoticed disgraces of our time, where we see the whole of our country casualised with temporary agency workers and migrant labour.”

The T&G is stepping up its recruitment drive across aviation, food processing, logistics and building services. It is targeting the industries that it sees as most open to growth in recruitment because of the prevalence of poor pay and contract employment.

This year it aims to add an extra 20,000 members through this recruitment. This is in addition to the 100,000 members a year it recruits through more traditional means, such as extending membership in already unionised workplaces.

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