Category: UK Employment Rights

It’s Not Over – Strengthen The Employment Rights Bill

Posted on March 27, 2025March 27, 2025 By Tony Burke

Three Years On From The P&O Sackings

There is still an opportunity to to strengthen the Employment Rights Bill

Please pass this model motion in your Union, Union Region or District, Union Conference, Union Branch or Workplace, Trade Union Council, Labour Party CLP, etc.

Winning A New Deal For Working People

This (_______________________________________ Branch/Committee/Council/Conference, Trade Council, Labour Party CLP) notes that Labour’s 2024 Employment Rights Bill (ERB) contains elements of the New Deal for Working People including individual day one rights for workers plus some restrictions on zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire.

We welcome Labour’s repeal of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, 2023 and the ballot thresholds, ballot paper wording prescriptions and appointment of picket supervisors introduced by the Tory Trade Union Act, 2016. However, we note with concern that under Labour’s ERB while notice periods for industrial action are reduced from fourteen to seven days, requirements for trade unions to give notice of ballots and to identify numbers of workers, workplaces and categories remain in place.

Labour’s renamed New Deal (Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay) does not address the fundamental power imbalance between workers and employers in UK law including the absence of a legal right to strike, the ban on the right to take sympathy action criticised by the ILO in its 2023 report on the P&O Ferries scandal, and the ban on so-called political strikes introduced by Tory governments in the 1980s. We deplore Labour’s failure to reinstate workplace ballots.

We further note that key elements of the New Deal for Working People have been dropped from Labour’s ERB, such as the introduction of sectoral collective bargaining across the economy through Fair Pay Agreements other than for school support staff in England and adult social care workers, with the caveats that these will not be collective agreements “as normally understood”.

We condemn those Labour MPs, donors and business interests who lobby Labour ministers and officials for the New Deal to be limited and scaled back. We believe the New Deal and Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay must be a beginning, not the end of a process of rebuilding workers’ collective rights in Britain.

This (__________________________________ Branch/Committee/Council/Conference, Trades Council, Labour Party CLP) agrees:

1. to campaign for the extension of the New Deal through Fair Pay Agreements (sectoral collective bargaining) wherever unions believe them to be appropriate and necessary;

2. to support legal and parliamentary amendments to the 2024 Employment Rights Bill that seek to restore and strengthen trade union collective rights;

3. to call for further legislation within the lifetime of the current Labour government to establish a legal right to strike and remove undemocratic bans on sympathy strikes;

4. to encourage union branches, committees and councils to affiliate to the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom

Union Activists & Supporters Call For Major Improvements To Employment Rights Bill

Posted on March 24, 2025 By Tony Burke

By Adrian Weir

Union activists and supporters gathered in central London on Saturday, March 22nd calling for major improvements and a more robust Employment Rights Bill currently passing through Parliament.

Union leaders, rank and file activists, leading labour lawyers, progressive academics and MPs lined up at the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom rally to point out the shortcomings in the Bill.

Many argue that the present Bill is far from what Labour originally promised in its New Deal for Working People, adopted at party conference.

Garfield Hylton, a GMB activist from Amazon’s Coventry depot, explained how Amazon’s union busting techniques when faced with a recognition claim will not be outlawed under the Bill.

Tabusam Ahmed, a Unite officer from London, spoke against outsourcing which, despite Labour’s promise to bring about a wave of insourcing, is hardly mentioned.

Eddie Dempsey, transport union general secretary, and Martyn Gray, director of organising at maritime union Nautilus, both spoke about how P&O Ferries had fired 800 seafarers and replaced them with labour recruited by an overseas agency.

Mr Dempsey argued that under the terms of the Bill another P&O Ferries could happen tomorrow.

A group of migrant domestic workers at the rally said that they were permanently tied to even abusive employers through their visa, under a law brought in by the Tories, arguing the Bill should have recognised their plight.

Lord John Hendy KC described the implausibility of a worker on a zero hours contract being able to insist on being given a guaranteed hours contact and keeping their job.

Other key deficiencies in the Bill, such as no real sectoral collective bargaining and no repeal of the 1980s restrictions on the right to strike were comprehensively dealt with by Lori Holmes from PSC, Professor Keith Ewing and John McDonnell MP.

Activists have been urged to lobby Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds to accept forthcoming amendments made to the Bill in the House of Lords, before campaigning for a further bill, dubbed Employment Rights #2.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star March 24th.

A Bill That Falls Short Of The Bold Action We Need

Posted on March 23, 2025 By Tony Burke

Andy McDonald MP. Photo: (c) The Labour Party

The Employment Rights Bill is a vital opportunity to rebalance power between workers and employers. As it passes to the Lords, pressure must be brought to bear to strengthen this key legislation, argues Andy McDonald

For decades, workers in Britain have faced a steady erosion of their rights, job security and real wages.The objective of the Employment Rights Bill, rightly heralded as the most significant expansion of workers’ rights in a generation, is to reverse this trend and improve working conditions.

However, its passage through Parliament highlighted just how significant the gaps in employment law and trade union legislation have developed over the decades and have so limited the effectiveness of unions in their task of fully defending their members.

The backdrop to the Bill is more than a decade of austerity attacks on incomes which the Spring Statement and other government decisions, such as on welfare, threaten to continue.

The decline of workers’ rights in Britain has been systematic, dating back to the Thatcher government’s legal restrictions on trade unions, collective bargaining and mass privatisation in the 1980s.

Forty years ago, around three-quarters of the workforce was covered by collective bargaining; now it is only around a quarter. These measures laid the groundwork for the insecurity that defines today’s labour market.

The rise of the gig economy, characterised by zero-hours contracts, bogus self-employment and agency work, has only worsened conditions.

Companies such as Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon dictate employment terms with minimal accountability, making the need for robust legislative protections all the more important and necessary.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in trade union activity, with public-sector workers in schools, hospitals and the Civil Service, as well as employees in transport and postal services, taking collective action against poor employer decisions and practices.

That greater numbers have been driven to strike highlights the pressing need for stronger worker protections.

Undoubtedly the Employment Rights Bill represents progress, but the government should have incorporated even more of the provisions from the New Deal for Working People to ensure the Bill was even more transformative.

Although it takes aim at exploitative practices such as zero-hours contracts, fire-and-rehire tactics and weak protections for agency workers, certain business lobbies have already attempted to secure dilutions in its provisions and they will inevitably continue to do so.
Three key areas require urgent action to ensure the Bill delivers meaningful change.

First, employment status must be clearly defined in law. A single legal definition of worker status is needed to close loopholes that allow companies to misclassify employees as self-employed, denying them essential rights such as minimum wage and holiday pay.

Even the government’s own director of labour market enforcement has warned that further delays in addressing this issue will only prolong worker exploitation.

The government has said it intends to consult on this. We are told it’s not a matter of committing to single status, it’s a matter of how to implement it and hence the proposed consultation.

The problem is that in the meantime, unscrupulous actors will seek to transfer workers out of employment and into fragile working arrangements.

Second, stronger measures are needed to prevent fire-and-rehire tactics.

While the Bill increases compensation for unfair dismissals, financial penalties alone are inadequate. When P&O Ferries fired 800 workers via video call in 2022, they knowingly broke employment law because the fines were trivial compared to their profits.

A more effective deterrent would be to grant trade unions the power to seek injunctions to prevent mass dismissals before they happen — an essential measure the government has refused to support.

Third, sectoral collective bargaining must be restored to combat declining real wages.

The Bill introduces new collective bargaining mechanisms, such as a negotiating body for adult social care and a re-established body for school support staff. While these are positive developments, they do not go far enough.

The New Deal for Working People pledged to introduce fair pay agreements across the economy, reinstating sector-wide collective bargaining to guarantee fair wages and conditions. But fair pay agreements are not designed to be a substitute for full sectoral collective bargaining; furthermore research from the OECD and IMF confirms that strong bargaining systems benefit not only workers but also the wider economy by boosting productivity and reducing inequality.

Existing national bargaining structures, such as public-sector pay review bodies, could serve as models for expanding sector-wide agreements. However, the Bill explicitly states that its newly introduced negotiating bodies should not be considered collective bargaining structures under the law, limiting their independence.

Trade union leaders such as Paul Nowak (TUC) and Mick Lynch (for GS of the RMT) have urged the government to support stronger collective bargaining rights, but my amendments to enact those calls were not supported.

Similarly, there has been no progress on restructuring negotiating bodies to ensure they function as genuine collective bargaining mechanisms, a change strongly advocated by John McDonnell MP.

A clear opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of sectoral collective bargaining lies within the Civil Service, where hundreds of separate pay bargaining units create inefficiencies. Modernising this system would streamline negotiations and establish fair pay across departments.

The Bill now moves to the House of Lords, where no doubt allies such as Lord John Hendy, Tony Woodley, and Christine Blower and others will push for further improvements.

After 14 years of wage stagnation, job insecurity and rising inequality, this Bill represents a vital opportunity to rebalance power between workers and employers.

What we have to guard against is the determination of some companies to bypass these new rights and render them meaningless. If we are to end exploitative employment practices we need decisive action.

The ultimate goal should be to foster a renewed culture of workplace democracy and collective bargaining. This Bill must be strengthened rather than weakened, and today’s Campaign for Trade Union Freedom conference offers an opportunity to advance this cause.

Now is the time to continue to press for bold reforms to secure a fairer future for all workers in Britain. We must seize this moment to implement meaningful change.

Andy McDonald is Labour Party Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.

This article appears in the Morning Star on 22nd March.

Employment Rights Bill: Is It Merely Good, Can It Be Made Great?

Posted on March 7, 2025March 7, 2025 By Tony Burke

By Adrian Weir, Assistant Secretary, Campaign for Trade Union Freedom

The Employment Rights Bill is, remarkably, possibly the only policy that has survived the transition from the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour under Keir Starmer. In the Corbyn era, in its earlier iteration, the Bill was a Green Paper known as the New Deal for Working People.

Equally as remarkable was that the Shadow Secretary of State responsible for the New Deal, Andy McDonald MP, was kept on under Starmer but not for long as clearly the new thinking in the Labour leadership had viewed New Deal for Working People as going too far on the side of trade union and worker rights.

At the meeting of Labour’s National Policy Forum last summer, although held behind closed doors, it became apparent that there was at attempt by the claque around Starmer to limit the scope of the New Deal for Working People.

After the NPF the labour rights proposals became known as Making Work Pay: Delivering a New Deal for Working People that was eventually introduced into Parliament as the Employment Rights Bill.

I want to highlight 8 areas of weakness in the Bill, identified by our friends at the Institute of Employment Rights but this is by no means a comprehensive critique of it.

Starting with Single Status of Worker. Currently people at work are classified in three ways:

employee that we’re mostly familiar with – ”on the cards” – gets paid a regular wage or salary – enjoys most if not all employment rights

worker who gets paid by the task – for example, each delivery made by an Uber Eats rider – employers try to say self-employed contractor but the law has mostly said worker – enjoy fewer employment rights

self-employed for our purposes we’re discussing the mostly bogus self-employed, particularly in the construction industry, enjoy virtually no employment rights.

Prior to publication of the Bill, Labour was committed to a move to single status of worker that would have only excluded the genuinely self-employed in business on their own account. But the Employment Rights Bill does not deliver on this.

In fact, it adds to the complexity in that it gives some new rights to employees, some new rights to workers and some rights to new categories of ad hoc workers.

Moving on to Union Recognition. In the 25 years since a statutory recognition procedure was carried into law it has been beset with problems. For example, employers either challenge the figures for employee support in the courts or mount aggressive anti-union campaigns.

The Bill does propose to significantly lower the thresholds (from 10% support down to even as low as 2% to initiate the procedure and, a simple majority of those voting in any formal ballot) needed to pursue a claim for statutory recognition but any system that has a ballot as its end point is likely to be bedevilled by aggressive employers’ countermeasures, as happened at Amazon Coventry.

Turning to Zero Hours Contracts. Prior to publication Labour proposed to ban “exploitative” zero hours contracts saying that everyone should have a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work in a 12 week reference period.

The Bill says that employers must offer zero hours and low hours workers a contract based on “guaranteed hours” drawn from the reference period – workers would be free to decline a guaranteed hours contract – but there are insufficient safeguards to prevent workers being coerced into not accepting a guaranteed hours contract and thereby staying on zero hour arrangements.

Turning next to Fire and Rehire. Labour promised to end the scourge of fire and rehire. However, the Bill does not ban fire and rehire outright. Employers are given a significant get out if the reason for fire and rehire was for a substantial business reason to keep the business solvent.

The terms of the Bill would not cover at all the P&O Ferries situation where the workforce was fired and replaced with a new set of workers supplied by an overseas employment agency.

No immediate, injunctive relief is on offer to workers unfairly subjected to fire and rehire.

On the question of Trade Union Access Labour had a clear commitment to allow for trade union access to workplaces for recruitment and organisational purposes. The Bill does not provide for this; it sets out a procedure for negotiating with employers to reach an access agreement, which is not the same as a right of access. A really obstinate employer may have to pay the equivalent of a fine if access is continually denied but a fine does nothing for a union in gaining access.

Collective Bargaining was the most equalising social system ever devised. The collapse of collective bargaining over the past 45 years is a causal factor in the long term decline in working class living standards and share of the national wealth.

Labour promised to establish Fair Pay Agreements across the economy to be negotiated through sector wide collective bargaining. This single move could have gone some distance in restoring to working people a fairer share of national wealth.

But, the Bill proposes just two FPAs, in adult social care and school support staff, and even then it’s not really collective bargaining as if the unions and employers come up with a deal the appropriate Secretary of State does not like it s/he can impose a settlement.

There is no provision in the Bill to roll out sector wide collective bargaining in any sector of the economy.

On industrial action Labour made a commitment to “[repeal] anti-trade union legislation … in order to remove unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity … the laws regulating industrial action should ensure that UK law complies in every respect with the international obligations ratified by the UK, including those of the International Labour Organisation and the European Social Charter.”

This was assumed to mean that the most restrictive anti-trade union law from the 1980s and ‘90s would be repealed as well as more recent anti-union laws. In the event, the Bill only proposes to repeal the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, 2023 and most, but not all, of the Trade Union Act, 2016.

This means that UK labour law will remain outside of the provisions of international standards that UK governments have signed up to. Essentially workers in the UK will still be denied a meaningful right to strike with, for example, complex balloting arrangements, no solidarity action permissible, giving the employer notice of industrial action and, limitations on picketing. The volume and complexity of the 1980s legalisation denies the right to strike to workers in the UK.

Finally, on Equalities the Bill falls short of what it could have delivered. Much of what is promised will be enacted through Regulations rather than being in the primary legislation so will allow for much more ministerial discretion. New rights and enforcement methods on sexual harassment, equal pay and family friendly rights should be much clearer and in the text of the Bill.

Many of the proposals in the Bill have been significantly diluted since the original publication of New Deal for Working People probably at the behest of business and lack of commitment among the Labour leadership. So we’ve ended up with what has been called a “good” Bill but not a “great” Bill.

The Campaign for Trade Union Freedom is hosting a rally on 22 March aimed to mobilising union activists and supporters to take action on strengthening the Bill; to make it clear that the Bill should be a legal intervention on the side of workers and their unions, to redress the legal imbalances in the workplace that we have endured since the Thatcher era.

Speakers at the rally will have first-hand experience of dealing with the great injustices of our age including outsourcing, union recognition when faced with a hostile employer and fire and rehire, P&O Ferries style. Trade union general secretaries and leading legal experts will highlight the Bill’s deficiencies and make the case for Amendments as the Bill passes through Parliament.

No one will advocate that MPs should vote against the Bill but our movement really does need to campaign so that the Bill gives us what we need; we should never be in the position of just accepting what’s on offer.

See you at the rally!

This blog was first published on Labour Outlook