Employment Rights Bill 2025 so far (Part 2)
As noted in the first half of the analysis of the new Employment Rights Bill, the bill also introduces sweeping and very welcome changes to the rights of trade unions to organise their workers and enter employer premises in order to do so. This is in addition to the repealing of some of the more archaic echoes of restrictive law introduced by the last administrations.
Firstly, employers are now obligated to provide all new employees with ‘a written statement’ about their right to join a trade union. This was once a routine practice by enlightened employers, which faded out from the early 1980’s.
In an amendment to the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, employers must allow trade unions onto their premises subject to the terms of an “access agreement.” Under the new rules, the trade union seeking access must be allowed to ”meet, represent, recruit, organise workers or engage in collective bargaining.” However, they cannot organise industrial action. Section 70ZB of the ‘Bill’ details the mechanics of making such an ask by a trade union, including that it must provide access needs, be made in the prescribed form, and provide the prescribed information.
The employer is still entitled to dictate the prescribed period allowed however, the union can enter into negotiations if it feels that the grounds for refusal are unlawful, as outlined by the employer. If the matter still cannot be resolved through internal negotiations, it can be referred to the Central Arbitration Committee to make a final decision. The committee will then layout in explicit terms the nature of the right of access and detail the prescribed nature of that visit. They do this by looking at the nature of the request made by the trade union in question and balancing that against the employers’ arguments for why such a visit would prove disruptive to them, specifically, they would have to refer to both operational and financial concerns as part of this process. Access agreements can be varied by the agreement to both parties, however if one or other party arbitrarily chooses to ignore the terms of an access agreement, then the opposing party has the right to make an initial complaint to the Central arbitration committee who will make a recommendation about how best to proceed. If appropriate, the Central Arbitration Committee can impose a financial penalty.
Disputes over the findings reached by the Central Arbitration Committee may be appealed up to the Employment Appeals Tribunal to make a final decision.
The bill later goes on to address the issue of trade union recognition in the workplace for the purposes of collective bargaining. For a number of years, the legislation surrounding the right of trade unions to be involved on a statutory basis has become even more difficult, effectively excluding the expertise a trade unions from large redundancy processes. The bill seeks to redress this balance by making it easier for trade unions to be both recognised and for the test to meet statutory recognition to be made easier.
Further, the definition of the amount of time trade union representatives are allowed off work in order to conduct union-related business if they are ‘equality representatives’ has now been expanded to include ‘learning representatives’, which will facilitate trade unions to provide a wide range of training to their members than the previous, much more narrow definition. Also, there are notable changes to industrial action: turnout and ballots including the repealing of a considerable amount of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, which should allow for unions to picket in a meaningful way without having to have a legal qualification to understand which banal and entirely and unrelated piece of secondary legislation is being exercised against them in order to arrest them and prevent them from their alienable right to picket. It is worth noting here that the TUC wrote about the rapidly diminishing rights unions have compared to other OECD members [1]. Hopefully, the Bill will help to address some of these issues, but it is far from dealing with them all.
The Bill also protects picketing members from suffering any kind of detriment for electing to take such action.
Thankfully, the Bill has kept its promise to repeal the Strikes Minimum Service Levels Act 2023, which has been particularly targeted as an example of the appalling rights UK trade unions experience. [2]
Finally, Section 5 deals with changes to ‘The Enforcement of Market Legislation’, which doesn’t affect most members, though rest assured we will ensure that we keep all of our members up-to-date if any of the currently proposed changes are likely to have any direct impact on us as a Union.
Despite initial support for the Bill as it was proposed in its initial form, the larger Trade Unions, including Unite the Union and UNISON, broadly agreed with the TUC that overall the bulk of the changes would rebalance a very unbalanced playing field. However, the TUC has repeatedly called out the government for breaching the ILO regulations. This, adding to the spat between Unite and the TUC over the Birmingham bin strike, has further fractured the brief spell of apparent unity, with UNITE now threatening to leave the TUC altogether. Taken together, the new Bill goes a long way to removing the most draconian practices of the last two years and hopefully aims to usher in a more collaborative and collective work relationship, rather than one predicated on mistrust and confrontation.
This concludes our two-parter on the new Employment Rights Bill, but if any last-minute changes should occur, we will of course update you. Over the next coming weeks we will start to look at the government’s (and verbally) the global commitment to tackle climate change, what these changes will mean, how the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies will actually happen, and finally the role that workers and trade unions can play in assisting to make this process as seamless as possible.
[1] https://bit.ly/3H6xNGf , [2] https://bit.ly/46pXCLT