The five key pledges that shadow Commons leader Angela Eagle will take to workplaces across Britain this week address the most pressing problems faced by working people — low pay, insecure jobs, soaring bills, eroded workplace rights and the market-induced chaos afflicting the National Health Service.

The Con-Dem coalition is vulnerable on every count.

It is responsible for the wage freezes and below-inflation increases that have seen public-sector pay lose its value year on year.

Its savage spending cuts choked off a budding economic recovery in 2010, transferring wealth from workers to the super-rich and resulting in the average Briton taking home £50 a week less in real terms than when David Cameron and Nick Clegg came to power.

The vindictive bedroom tax has made some of the poorest people in the country fall behind with unaffordable rent payments, while its market-obsessed ministers have refused to lift a finger to tackle the burgeoning cost of energy or transport or take action over the explosion of zero-hours contracts taking place on their watch.

Some suggest there is no real difference between Labour and the Conservatives on policy.

Cameron’s former speechwriter Ian Birrell was even given a platform by the Guardian to advocate a Labour-Tory coalition after the next election — though his stipulation that the Tories would need to control both No 10 and the Exchequer to ensure continued austerity, while Labour would only be allowed control of education and health if it dropped opposition to private-sector involvement, illustrate the reality that Britain’s biggest parties are not the same.

Coming so soon after the Tories’ latest pledge to force even more draconian restrictions on workers’ right to strike, the five things “Labour will do in government to make Britain work for working people” mark a welcome escalation of Labour’s election campaign.

But the 14 trade unions that are part of the Labour Party should be under no illusion that these five pledges are enough.

There are some good reminders of how Labour can make an immediate, practical improvement to people’s lives — by repealing Andrew Lansley’s privatising Health and Social Care Act and recruiting thousands more nurses and GPs, for example, or by scrapping the bedroom tax.

But on other issues the party remains troublingly vague. What does “building partnerships between employers and workers” mean?

A promise to reform the employment tribunal system is similarly opaque.

Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna is right to slam the Tories for pricing workers out of justice by imposing crippling employment tribunal fees on anyone wishing to challenge bosses over victimisation, unfair dismissal or other workplace injustices.

But Labour has stopped short of simply saying it will scrap the fees, and the precise nature of the reforms Umunna has in mind is unclear — with rumours of means-tested fees or payments linked to the size of claims doing the rounds on websites linked to the party.

Capped rail fare rises and an energy price freeze are good policies, but Labour remains too timid to grasp the nettle of renationalisation of transport and utilities, which is the only way to ensure that these essential services are run in the public interest.

None of the major parliamentary parties are willing to make the case for public ownership. But the unions are. It is the labour movement and not the politicians who have the answers to Britain’s capitalist crisis — which is why the Con-Dems have tried to silence unions with their anti-democratic gagging Act.

We must not be cowed. Let’s make this election campaign a campaign for the right of working people to organise — and for the right of their organisations to a commanding political voice.