The new Employment Rights Bill is being trumpeted as a victory for workers, and on the surface, there are some real wins: day-one unfair dismissal rights, guaranteed hours for agency workers, stronger collective bargaining, and improved sick pay. But a closer look shows there’s still plenty missing, and, as ever, it will all come down to enforcement.
First, the positives.
Scrapping the two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal means workers will no longer have to wait to be protected from arbitrary sackings. That’s an important shift of power away from bosses who’ve long used probation periods and short-term contracts to keep workers in a permanent state of insecurity. Similarly, guaranteeing hours for agency workers means the end of the worst excesses of zero-hours exploitation, where bosses treat workers as permanently on-call without any guaranteed pay. Strengthened collective bargaining, lowering the threshold for union recognition, is another step in the right direction. Unions have been gutted by decades of anti-worker legislation; this starts to rebalance things.
But let’s not get carried away.
The real test of any workers’ rights bill is whether it is properly enforced. Without a well-funded, proactive enforcement body, all these rights risk being theoretical. How many employers will actually comply without the threat of serious consequences? We’ve seen time and again that when the state leaves it to workers to enforce their own rights through tribunals, those rights become meaningless.
And then there’s what’s missing.
The bill does little to tackle the fundamental issue of pay. Without strong wage protections, such as sector-wide collective bargaining or a genuinely liveable minimum wage, workers will remain at the mercy of market forces that keep wages stagnant while profits soar. Nor does it address the wider social infrastructure workers need: housing, healthcare, childcare. Secure work alone doesn’t fix the fact that millions are trapped in precarious, low-paid jobs that barely cover the basics.
One glaring omission is the right to switch off. Technology was supposed to liberate us from work, to make our lives easier, but instead, it has shackled us to being always available, always on call. Emails, work chats, and constant digital monitoring mean many workers never truly stop working, even outside official hours. Without clear protections against this creeping erosion of personal time, workers will continue to be exploited under the guise of “flexibility” while bosses squeeze every last drop of unpaid labour out of them.
Then there’s the issue of zero-hours contracts. While the bill gives workers the right to guaranteed hours, it still allows zero-hours contracts if workers ‘choose’ them. But how free is that choice when employers can pressure workers into accepting these precarious contracts? Without strong safeguards, unscrupulous bosses will find ways to nudge workers into ‘voluntarily’ opting out of guaranteed hours, using veiled threats of reduced shifts or lost opportunities. What mechanisms will be in place to prevent this coercion? Without clear protections, zero-hours exploitation will continue under a different name.
Trade union rights have seen some positive movement, but not nearly enough. Lowering the threshold for union recognition is welcome (stopping those employers who flood workplaces with temporary workers), but workers still face enormous barriers when trying to organise. Employers routinely intimidate, victimise, or sack union activists, and this bill does little to stop them. There are no new protections against union-busting, no moves to strengthen the right to strike, and no serious rollback of the draconian anti-union laws that have crippled worker power for decades. Without stronger rights to organise, bargain, and take industrial action, any other workplace rights risk being toothless.
The reaction from business groups, whining about “burdens” and “red tape” tells us this bill is at least a step forward. But let’s be clear: rights on paper are worthless without the power to enforce them. The fight doesn’t end here. If workers want these rights to mean anything, they will have to organise to defend them, in the workplace, in the courts, and, crucially, on the streets.
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