The Employment Rights Bill: a potential gamechanger

The government’s Employment Rights Bill offers a real moment of hope for working people. Published on Thursday, this landmark piece of legislation represents a positive and ambitious plan to make work pay. And it will benefit millions of workers, especially those trapped in low-paid and insecure employment. 

A crucial first step for workers' rights

While there is still much to do to make sure the Bill delivers new rights effectively, it is a crucial first step towards delivering better quality employment right across the UK. It will help make Labour’s New Deal for Working People a reality. And it signals a decisive break from the Tories’ race to the bottom on employment standards that has done so much damage to our living standards and productivity.  

The package of measures in the Bill will be genuinely transformative. By tackling the scourge of zero hours contracts and fire and rehire, delivering day one rights to statutory sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal, and boosting family-friendly and flexible working, the Bill offers the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights for a generation. Everyone needs jobs they can build a life on. 

As well as clamping down on bad bosses, the Bill will also give workers a stronger voice at work. And crucially, it will make it easier for workers to benefit from union representation – as well as repealing the Tories’ toxic anti-union laws. 

Bringing workers’ rights into the mainstream

The government’s Employment Rights Bill is all about bringing our rights into the mainstream. Worker protections in the UK have failed to keep pace with a world of work that is changing fast. And our rights have also fallen behind those in other leading economies. 

And there’s a genuine appetite for change. The workers’ rights agenda is hugely popular with the British people. More than three-quarters of the public support measures to deliver a real living wage, with strong backing too for day one rights and action to tackle workplace exploitation and malpractice. 

Good for workers and good for business

Better employment standards will be good for workers – and also good for business. Giving people greater security at work will create a level playing field, so decent employers can’t be undercut by bad bosses. Our research shows there’s strong backing among managers for better workers’ rights – a clear majority believe they will improve workforce retention, profits and productivity. 

So good employers will get on board with the changes ahead – and the naysayers will be proved wrong. In the 1990s, Britain was full of businesses and lobbyists predicting the introduction of the minimum wage would cause mass unemployment and economic ruin – concerns echoed by the Conservative Party. 

Of course, the doom-mongers were wrong – 25 years on, the minimum wage is now embraced as a huge success by all. The same will be true of the Employment Rights Bill, with its common-sense package of changes. 

A historic opportunity for change

After a decade and a half of stagnant wages and spiraling insecurity, the Employment Rights Bill offers real hope to workers. It’s vital we work through the detail and get the implementation right. Delivered in full, the measures in the Bill will raise incomes and boost living standards across Britain. 

This is a historic opportunity to make work pay and deliver real change for working people. Let’s seize it.