Trade Union Roundtable: Is the Employment Rights Act the Change We Need?

The Employment Rights Act has been hailed as the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in generation, but how transformative is it? Five voices from the trade union movement reflect on the Act’s strengths, shortcomings, and the legislative change needed to protect workers in a shifting economy.

The Employment Rights Act is set to be transformative for the lives of working people, and for our entire economy

Our economy and our labour market are built on a foundation of insecurity. The choices made over decades have led to a low-wage, high-churn model which has meant productivity has flatlined. Workers are more productive when they can predict next month’s pay packet.

Not only that, but Labour promised real change to our workers’ rights laws in our manifesto, as part of ‘Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: A New Deal for Working People’. Delivering this is simply the right thing to do. 

That is what the Employment Rights Act is all about: rebalancing our economy in favour of working people, ending the ‘one-sided flexibility’ enjoyed only by employers, and giving working people the voice and the protections they need at work through their union. 

The Employment Rights Act introduces new rights to make it easier for workers to access unions in their workplace. 

Good employers already know the value of working with trade unions, ensuring their staff have their voice and security at work. This new right is for the workplaces where unions have been left out, for employers who feel the need to be confrontational with their workers by pursuing aggressive anti-union campaigns – those workplaces that usually have poorer pay and conditions for their workers.

Allowing unions to access workplaces is the first step to gaining recognition. And we know that when a workplace has a strong recognised trade union working with the employer, pay, conditions, and security drastically improve.

It was my dad’s secure, well-paid, unionised job on the production line at Ford’s Halewood that gave me a better life than my parents. It lifted us out of poverty and provided us with enough money for a decent home and enough for us to live a life of dignity. Everyone should have that opportunity. That is why I will fight for everyone to have decent work with access to their trade union. 

But how these new rights will work in practice will still need to be decided in secondary legislation.

To start, we need to be clear about how access should be organised. It should take place at least once a week, at a place and time where staff would normally take their breaks. This would allow workers to talk to their union without going out of their way. It would prevent some anti-union employers from keeping watch on who is speaking to their union, by allowing union representatives access in an area common to all staff, rather than a specific, separate place that could be identified and monitored by employers.

So what happens when rules are broken? Fines must provide a reasonable deterrent, to prevent bad employers from factoring in penalties as part of the cost of doing business. The government has suggested that such fines be capped at £75,000. This is pocket change for union-busting employers like Amazon, who in 2022 spent $14.2 million on anti-union consultants in the US alone. Surely the fairest way to work out a fine would be as a percentage of global turnover – see the welcome announcement regarding ticket-touting websites, which imposes a fine of ten per cent of turnover for things like reselling tickets at rip-off prices.

Small organisations cannot be exempt. This must be a default right of access for all workplaces, not only, as has been suggested, those with over twenty-one employees. UNISON estimates that 12,500 social care employers, over sixty-six per cent of social care organisations, have fewer than twenty-one employees. This kind of restriction could lock out some of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers from accessing their union. 

I was proud to vote for the Employment Rights Act at every opportunity I had. It has the potential to change the lives of working people and the nature of work in our country. Now we must commit our energy to the delicate task of getting its implementation right.

Anneliese Midgley is the Member of Parliament for Knowsley, and Secretary of the Trade Union Group of Labour MPs. 

Bringing unions in from the cold

It’s not much fun standing at the gates of an isolated warehouse trying to protect your pile of leaflets from the drizzle.

Nor is it an effective way of recruiting new members whizzing past in cars and buses.

But trade union organising in emerging areas of the private sector could be transformed by a relatively overlooked part of the Employment Rights Act.

The right of trade unions to access workplaces to recruit and organise workers is included in a suite of measures intended to boost workers’ collective voice – and give unions a chance to reverse their long-declining presence in the private sector.

These measures include a reduction in some of the red tape associated with union recognition rules; an initial step into sectoral collective bargaining with the Fair Pay Agreement in social care; and a repeal of the vast bulk of recent Tory anti-union legislation. The ability to use electronic balloting, rather than cumbersome (and expensive) postal votes allows unions to boost member engagement. Requiring employers to inform workers of their right to join a union is another nudge in the right direction. This package matters because facilitating a stronger collective voice for workers is a key part of the government’s strategy for boosting both working conditions and the UK’s lacklustre economy.

These measures build on improvements to individual rights like guaranteed hours contracts for zero- and short-hours workers, sick pay for virtually all workers, and massively improved unfair dismissal protection. These could provide a huge boost to workers at the sharper end of the labour market. 

Workers who have been in a workplace for longer and are more secure in their position might also be more willing to press their broader interests via a union.

Collective voice in the private sector has been muted in recent years. Just twelve per cent of private sector workers are in a trade union. A lot of job growth is in sectors like logistics, which rely on a churning pool of insecure workers, making union recruitment difficult and expensive. Employers are happy to invest huge sums to see off organising efforts. They have been aided by the steady tightening of restrictive legal provisions on union activity.

In the future, though, unions will be able to demand access to workplaces to meet potential members. Employers who defy these provisions will be fined.

Of course, like so much of the Employment Rights Act, the effectiveness of the legislation will depend on the robustness of the accompanying regulations and guidance.

In particular, it remains to be seen whether access applications will proceed quickly enough, and whether punishments will be strong enough to deter employers intent on stalling or blocking any union with the temerity to cross their threshold.

But it is in the interests of the government and its economic programme to make sure protections are effective. We know from analysis by Simon Deakin at Cambridge University that strong union rights are associated with higher employment, lower unemployment, and that elusive economic factor: improved productivity.

Bringing unions in from the cold and into the warehouses and call centres where so many workers now sit is well overdue.

Tim Sharp is Head of Employment Rights for the Trades Union Congress

The ERA alone cannot fi x our broken world of work

The Employment Rights Act is a historic step for workers’ rights in this country. Since Thatcher’s decimation of trade union power in the 1980s, workers and unions alike have been incrementally restricted in their ability to exercise power in the workplace. This legislation will bring an end to the perpetual diminishing of workers’ rights and create new opportunities for trade unions to expand everywhere, particularly in the private sector. 

The ERA resulted from an almost decade-long campaign—started by my union, the Communication Workers Union—which called for a New Deal for Working 

People. The Act represents a significant portion of the policies within the New Deal and enables necessary changes to workers’ individual rights that will empower millions across the country. 

However, in the view of our union and many others, the Act remains incomplete. Where it bolsters the individual rights of workers and releases unions from some of the most arduous restrictions implemented by the last Conservative government, it contains a weakness that may threaten to be fatal if not addressed by this Government – action on collective rights. 

In comparison to many of our international neighbours, Britain sticks out like a sore thumb for our lack of sectoral collective bargaining. Ruthless competition drives down wages and conditions across entire sectors of the economy, creates underclasses of workers, and fuels the endless loop of slow growth and poor productivity that the government so often laments. Though the Employment Rights Act commits to a ‘Fair Pay Agreement’ in the social care sector, the government has been reluctant to commit to further sectoral collective bargaining initiatives, even in sectors demonstrably less complex than the care sector. 

In an appropriate example, the Communication Workers’ Union represents over 100,000 Royal Mail postal workers, whose pay and conditions, the ‘gold standard’ in the industry, are being pushed into a race-to-the-bottom by unregulated parcel courier companies like Amazon, who utilise bogus self-employment to pay their workers a pittance. National institutions like Royal Mail, essential to the functioning of our communities, simply cannot survive persistent undercutting by billionaire-backed conglomerates, whose raison d’être is to extract as much profit as possible. A sectoral-level agreement in the parcels sector could not only prevent the exploitation of couriers, but support standards in the industry that will protect a sustainable, universal postal service for the future. 

This would also require a shift from our stratified employment classification system to a single ‘worker’ status, something that is not contained within the Employment Rights Act but remains a vague Government commitment. The ‘gigification’ of work across our economy, and the expansion of platform companies who almost unilaterally exploit those under their employ, is directly aided and abetted by our employment status system. There can be no complete transformation of workers’ rights unless a single status of worker is adopted and full employment rights, individual and collective, are applicable to every worker in the country. 

If the Government is to meaningfully achieve their stated goal of promoting growth and improving living standards for all, they cannot ignore the startling absence of collective rights from the current legislative agenda. In the race to unify Britain against the increasingly divisive and frantic public mood, nothing could be more pertinent.

Dave Ward is the General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union

Guaranteed Hours will change the game – if we get it right

There is so much in the Employment Rights Act of which our movement can be proud.

These new rights are game changing: a day-one right to sick pay, making work more family-friendly, limiting fire and rehire, stronger trade union rights, fair pay agreements, and, most importantly for my union, the new right to a contract that reflects the hours you actually work. 

But there is still so much vital work our movement needs to do in order to make sure these new rights are implemented in a way that lives up to the promise of the Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay.

It’s simple: the hours that you regularly work belong in your contract. For too long, flexibility at work has been largely in the hands of the employer, not the employee. 

This is true for the million-plus workers on zero-hours contracts, including 100,000 in the retail sector, but also for those subject to the wider problem of short hours. Even where workers do have a contracted number of hours, many find themselves working ten to twenty hours beyond that each week in overtime.

The employer has the ‘flexibility’ to give and take away these hours at a moment’s notice, leaving workers unable to plan their finances, their childcare, their lives. 

My union, Usdaw, surveyed our members on insecure contracts. One member responded:

“[I] would be happy with my overtime shift arrangement if the amount of hours I am given wasn’t quite so vastly different one week to the next. In last 4 weeks I have done a 35 hour week, followed by 14 hours, then 18 and 12. My average is 30 hours. Such reduction without any notice or explanation gives me a financial problem.”

It’s important that this right applies to everyone. Any loophole can and will be exploited by unscrupulous employers, so it must be watertight. Unions are clear that we must prevent employers from gaming the system by artificially manipulating a workers’ hours to avoid this new right.

From the start, the Employment Rights Act and the New Deal for Working 

People has been a partnership between Labour and the affiliated trade unions. These ground breaking policies came up through the union movement, directly from workers and workplaces, and were painstakingly negotiated by Labour’s affiliated unions. They’re about to be made real, changing lives in every part of the country. This would not have happened without a Labour Government – but it absolutely would not have happened without the collective voice of working people that unions bring to the heart of our party.

It is our responsibility now to live up to the promises made to working people in our manifesto and fully deliver the Employment Rights Act and the rest of the New Deal for Working People. There should be no delay – working people must feel the benefits long before the next election.

These changes are just one step towards tackling insecure work and rebalancing employment away from bad bosses and towards working people. The rest of the Employment Rights Act and the other commitments in the New Deal will make a difference to the members I represent in retail and distribution, and to millions of others, too.

Joanne Thomas is the Chair of National Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, and General Secretary of Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers

Organising at the frontier of AI

The Employment Rights Act is poised to be the most significant overhaul of UK employment law in a generation. For those of us organising within a frontier AI research lab, its arrival feels particularly timely.

The goals of union members at Google Deepmind are different from those of a typical union campaign. The vast majority of our objectives are not about negotiating better workplace conditions and more generous compensation, but rather about improving the societal impact of our work – and mitigating its potential harms.

Several elements of the Act are especially welcome. The reduction of the membership threshold required to trigger statutory union recognition—alongside the removal of the 40 per cent ballot turnout requirement—will dramatically shorten the path to formal recognition. Our chapter of UTAW has seen significant growth in recent years due to ethical concerns about the use of Google technology by the IDF and potentially the US Department of War.

We intend to make full use of the ERA’s new Workplace Access Rights. However, we are cautious. With no statutory timeframe for employers to grant access to union representatives, nor a defined minimum standard for what that entails, we anticipate it could take up to a year to secure some of the access we need. More importantly, the real tool for organising in a tech environment is direct, digital communication – specifically, the ability to email all non-union employees, and to educate an international workforce with varied perceptions of unions about the legitimacy, safety, and potential of workplace organising. Direct digital communication will transform other Deepmind workers’ perceptions of our union from that of an underground guerrilla network to a transparent, legally backed entity focused on workers’ rights.

The ERA empowers a government body, the Central Arbitration Committee, to fine workplaces up to £75,000 for non-compliance. While this is a step forward for many workers, it is wholly inadequate to those in an industry dominated by technological behemoths whose individual revenues rival the GDPs of all but the top forty wealthiest nations. A £75,000 penalty is a rounding error; it will not make them notice, let alone comply. Fines must be proportional to a company’s UK or global turnover, and escalate with subsequent breaches. 

 The Act represents a tentative step towards sectoral collective bargaining, currently limited to social care and support teachers. In the AI industry, where power is concentrated among a handful of global giants, we need the ability to set standards across the entire AI sector rather than negotiating workplace-by-workplace. This would not only improve our bargaining power, but also prevent companies from refusing demands on the grounds that it would put them at a competitive disadvantage.

Finally, the Act is missing protections that are critical for all industries. 

Consultation around AI-driven labour displacement, and protection against algorithmic dismissal (termination of employment decided by algorithms without human validation), is overdue. More fundamentally, employment rights must expand to account for the use and ethical implications of workers’ output. Due to the fragmented and industry-sensitive nature of frontier AI development, individual workers are often unaware of the uses to which their work may ultimately be applied. Yet, existing legislation does not recognise the uses of a worker’s labour as an employment rights matter. We cannot continue to pretend there is a neat separation between the development of technology and its real-world consequences. This must change if we want to improve the ethical footprint of worker output, scale back the psychological damage of tech-sector workplaces, and minimise the harm of AI to the global workforce in the modern era.

Anonymous United Tech and Allied Workers Organiser at Google Deepmind^*

* In an exception to Renewal editorial policy, this response has been rewritten with the assistance of AI to protect the author’s anonymity as an organiser at a frontier AI lab.