‘To deliver day-one rights, unions like mine chose strategy over stalemate’

Perhaps the strangest perception of trade unions that exists in the modern media landscape is that we are people who hate to negotiate. 

I have never shared this view. Negotiation is the job. If there is a better deal on the table, I always want my team to be willing to get in a room with an employer and thrash it out. Finding compromises between workers and employers (and sometimes between groups of workers!) is the art of trade unionism. 

The reality is that the deal unions have agreed to, in order to adjust the unfair dismissal protections in the Employment Rights Bill is both a good deal for our members and a necessary one – if it wasn’t, unions would simply not have agreed to it.

The context and the details are extremely important here. 

READ MORE: Labour drop day one protection from unfair dismissal

The commitment to introduce unfair dismissal rights from day one was always going to be difficult to implement in practice. That’s why the government had proposed the messy solution of reducing the qualifying period to zero, but adding a nine-month probationary period which was still undefined. This kept the idea of day one rights alive, but introduced considerable uncertainty. 

In addition, a significant element of the compensation regime for unfair dismissal is based on length of service. Somebody unfairly dismissed in the first weeks of their contract may have been able to win a case under the proposed system, but they would have had to go through a long wait for an employment tribunal in order to secure precious little compensation. 

There was a real risk that the plan would please nobody. Employers hated the legal uncertainty, unions would have ended up complaining that the right was not worth the paper it was written on. Many in the union movement had concerns about this, along with pro-union legal commentators and policy experts like the Resolution Foundation (hardly a right wing think tank!).

Despite this, the government has tried everything to get this legislation through, only to be repeatedly defeated on this (and some other issues) in the House of Lords. 

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Whatever your view of the ethics of the Lords blocking a manifesto commitment in this way, the reality is that they are blocking it, which risks pushing back the implementation of the Bill until late in the parliament. 

Every month the Bill is delayed is another month without new protections on sick pay, new maternity and paternity rights, and where employers can fire and rehire workers with impunity. It is also another month without the new union access rights which will prevent anti-union employers keeping us from speaking to workers and organising in the workplace. 

Rights delayed are rights denied, which is why unions pushed the government to commit to introduce this Bill in the first 100 days of the parliament.

The government ultimately could have circumvented the House of Lords, but this is an incredibly lengthy process which could take the best part of a year. The government was willing to go down this route, but ultimately unions decided against it. 

Faced with the prospect of waiting until 2027 or 2028 for these rights, the case for returning to the negotiating table was overwhelming, and it was the union side who initiated the discussions. Unions engaged with a clear set of objectives, which we ultimately secured. The nine-month probation period is gone. The cap on compensation for unfair dismissal is also gone, meaning that a key union policy objective since the 1990s has been achieved. And there is a commitment from business groups to withdraw their opposition to the Bill. Nothing less than this would have persuaded unions to engage in this negotiation. 

In my view we have significantly strengthened unfair dismissal rights for millions of workers, created a compelling deterrent against bad employer behaviour, and given ourselves the best possible chance of getting this legislation into law. 

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Other views are of course available, but I am yet to see a compelling alternative strategy for getting this Bill into law. Standing on the sidelines and shouting is always an option for unions but, after 14 years of doing this with precious little to show for it, I know I’d always rather be around the negotiating table. After all, that is where unions do our best work.

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