EDITORIAL: Putting Labour to Work

The new Employment Rights Act empowers unions and enhances protections for workers, but it also exposes deep divisions within the Labour Party. Beyond the Act, Britain’s drive to reindustrialise confl icts with a digital economy that detaches work from place. Can a politics of work help Labour regain control of the narrative and rebuild its fractured coalition?

Everyone is worried about work. Not just about the demands of finding and keeping work in a weak job market, but about where work is going to come from in the future. Generative artificial intelligence looms large in these debates, balanced against the desire to restore good jobs and the need to reindustrialise for national security. The Labour government has made work a central pillar of its policy agenda, as reflected in the landmark Employment Rights Act – a focus of this issue. Like any ambitious piece of legislation, the Act is necessarily a compromise, and finds critics across the political spectrum. As the government navigates a set of social and economic contradictions partly defined by professional and occupational distinctions, it remains to be seen whether a politics of work can help Labour overcome its current disorientation. 

As of December 2025, the Employment Rights Act is law, to be implemented in stages from April 2026. The ERA significantly expands the presence and visibility of trade unions in the workplace, introduces stronger protections against unfair dismissal, expands family entitlements, ends exploitative practices such as ‘fire and rehire’, and provides workers with rights to guaranteed hours. 

The ERA, frequently cited by the Prime Minister and Cabinet as evidence that they do, in fact, have a transformative economic agenda, enjoys broad public support.¹ But it has arguably failed to provide the redemptive media narrative the government craves as it is progressively weakened by scandal, unpopularity, and a pervasive sense of drift. Indeed, the ERA has opened the government to new lines of attack from the centre-right, driven by the concerns of business. 

Work, and the Employment Rights Act, represent several faultlines currently dividing the Labour Party. The ERA’s most high-profile champion in parliament is Angela Rayner, though it has retained the Prime Minister’s support even with Rayner’s fall from grace. It has been supported by Labour’s resurgent soft left, as well as by trade unions and union-affiliated MPs, some of whose views are represented in a roundtable in this issue. The Blue Labour tendency, meanwhile, has long argued for a stronger assertion of the labour interest and the dignity of work as part of a new national economy based on production. 

The ERA’s provisions have been challenged, however, on both the left and right of the party. Voices on the left, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, have criticised the government for abandoning its manifesto pledge to implement day-one unfair dismissal protections. Some centrist voices, meanwhile, have advanced a tentative criticism of the ERA on the premise that it risks stymying labour market flexibility and the country’s ability to adapt to new technologically driven industries.² There are some signs that such criticisms of the government’s wider agenda have convinced the overly cautious Treasury to hit the brakes on yet another aspect of the so-called ‘Plan for Change’. 

This issue blends long-range historical perspective, focused policy studies, and foundational conversations about good work in an age of technological rupture. But our contributors arrive at a common conviction: any approach to good work that limits its ambitions to technocratic policy change, without rebuilding collective power and strong institutions, will fail to satisfy or mobilise an electorate whose experiences of work increasingly subvert policymakers’ assumptions. 

In our opening roundtable on the Employment Rights Act, three leading figures in the trade union movement, a trade union-aligned MP, and a union organiser working at the frontier of AI development highlight the Act’s significance as a reflection of the close relationship between the Labour government and the trade union movement. While broadly welcoming the Act, contributors also point to the need for its provisions to be strengthened through secondary legislation, its limitations in terms of sectoral collective bargaining, and its impotence in challenging abuses by the world’s most powerful companies.

It is impossible to isolate either the Labour Party or the ERA from the larger political economy of work. The ERA seeks to undo decades of reforms that have tilted the playing field towards employers (and ‘flexibility’) in pursuit of a service-based economy. Two historical contributions explore how this uneven playing field came to be, and the limitations of progressive reform unmoored from a clear commitment to collective rights. 

In a wide-ranging historical account, Jon Cruddas situates Labour’s employment rights agenda in the long history of British labour law. He argues that while the Employment Rights Act expands worker protections and reverses Conservative-era constraints on labour organising, it maintains the New Labour focus on individual rights rather than collective bargaining; thus, it risks failing to arrest long-term trajectories of union decline. Meanwhile, Benjamin Thomas warns that contemporary social democratic visions of economic and industrial democracy, which have been embraced by the contemporary left as strategies for shifting power from capital to workers, have historically been deployed by 

Conservative policymakers to weaken the bargaining power of organised labour. For both Cruddas and Thomas, this historical perspective shows that social democratic strategies for economic and industrial democracy require a clear commitment to the interests of workers and the working class. 

Several contributions locate work at the intersection of various structural forces: global capital, the rise of new tech platforms, and the continued relevance of place. Jimena Valdez highlights the profound inequalities endemic to the platform economy, arguing that these can be challenged through greater vertical solidarity between high paid ‘venture workers’ and low-paid and precarious ‘gig workers’. Abby Jitendra and Josh Westerling stress the importance of an employment rights system that encompasses workers who fall outside of the formal categories of employment and self-employment, and urges Labour not to ignore the mobilisation of these groups by the Greens and Reform.  

The geopolitically motivated reindustrialisation of the British economy, which requires that production be based on proximity to resources and skilled labour, now clashes with a digitally propelled process of dematerialisation, whereby platform and service jobs uproot work from any material location. The competing paths often posed for this Labour government— between, for example, a more conservative politics focused on small towns and national security versus a more progressive politics focused on big cities and global openness—map, in part, onto this tension between the rematerialisation and dematerialisation of work. These paths promise different futures to different workers in different regions, and require different electoral strategies. But the task of any new politics of work capable of combatting both the Greens and Reform will be to bridge these sometimes-opposing tendencies.

Does the ERA provide a basis for this? Several of our contributors reflect on how the Act relates to these larger structural questions. Ewan Gibbs traces the limitations of an official rhetoric of a green ‘just transition’, showing how contemporary processes of deindustrialisation in the Scottish oil industry threaten the same community decline and political disaffection that have accompanied past energy transitions. Jane Gingrich argues that beyond strategies of ‘compensation’ or ‘activation’, state reactions to technological labour market changes need to be embedded in strong institutions and organisational foundations. Jonny Ball calls for Labour to embed the bargaining power of labour within a comprehensive new vision for a post-liberal national political economy.

Belonging and embeddedness are also central to positive visions of twenty-first century work: Hilary Cottam draws on the conversations and ‘Imaginings’ she conducted across the UK when researching her book The Work We Need to show that good work requires not just material security, but avenues for meaning and new relationships to time, play, leisure, and place. And in conversation with fellow political theorist Steven Klein, Elizabeth Anderson, author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers can Take it Back, argues that social democrats need to rediscover the progressive and anti-elitist origins of the ‘Protestant work ethic’, and develop more ambitious visions of good work for the twenty-first century.

Where does this leave us? A politics of work offers Labour connective thread to repair the frayed electoral coalition it wove together at the last general election. The ERA provides workers with tools to reinforce and protect their power in anticipation of future challenges, including automation and rearmament. But as much as the ERA is welcome and important, it reveals some of this government’s limits in both policymaking and political vision. On policy,  Labour too often relies upon sclerotic state mechanisms to tackle new problems, rather than attempt novel approaches. On the political front, the assumption that voters’ material interests align with their political behaviour, and that reforms like the ERA will speak for themselves, reveals a degree of operational naivety. As this issue shows, both the worries and the desires we invest in work provide openings for Labour to produce a vision of a better and more secure society. Our hope is that, as part of a wider programme of national renewal, landmark legislation like the ERA signals a turning point at which Labour embraces a positive, progressive vision of change and, crucially, shows it can deliver on it.

Lise Butler is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at City St. George’s, University of London, and a co-editor of Renewal. 

Steven Klein is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London, and a contributing editor to Renewal.

Frederick Harry Pitts is Associate Professor in Political Economy and the Future of Work at the University of Exeter and a contributing editor to Renewal.

Notes

1. Trades Union Congress, ‘NEW mega poll shows Employment Rights Bill’s critics are “a world away” from the British public’, www.tuc.org.uk, 10 February 2025.
2. Kate Devlin, ‘Scrap Rayner’s workers’ rights reforms, Starmer-linked think tank urges’, www.independent.co.uk,19 December 2025.