UK

“Still somewhat shackled”

 

December 10, 2024HubMP2012

The Government’s new legislation does not allow unions to generate as much leverage over employers as they need, explains Gregor Gall.

Based on last year’s figures, by January 4th next year at around one o’clock in the afternoon, the average earnings of chief executives of the top 100 companies will have surpassed the average salary for a whole year for a full-time worker in Britain. The value of what chief executives bring to the table is not one hundred and twenty times more the worth of what the average paid worker brings to the table. This is just one of the most startling instances of the continuing economic inequality in Britain.  

Even though the Labour Government’s employment law reforms, embodied in the Employment Rights Bill 2024, were born out of ‘Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay’ (previously entitled ‘A New Deal for Working People’), it is clear these proposed reforms will not make work pay for most workers.

The Employment Rights Bill 2024 sets out reforms to union recognition, collective bargaining and industrial action. But the problem is that the Bill does not provide a right for unions to have access to workers for recruiting and organising. It simply gives them the right to ask a government body for this access but that government body has no powers of enforcement.

This then undermines the significant improvements being made to the right to union recognition (and thus also collective bargaining on pay) through lowering the levels of worker support needed to gain it from an employer. And in only one instance is Labour proposing to set up the machinery for a sector-wide ‘Fair Pay Agreement’, namely, the adult social care sector. Lastly, while some of the most onerous obligations on unions when undertaking industrial action have been removed, many remain so that unions are still somewhat shackled. The result is unions are not able to generate as much leverage over employers as they need.

Let’s look at some of the detail of this. There will be a mechanism for facilitating union access where certain criteria are met. A union will be able to ask an employer to enter into an access agreement, and that if the employer refuses, the union will be able to then apply to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which can effectively impose an access arrangement. As with the process for gaining union recognition, the application for access will not be a quick or easy one. Indeed, the process will essentially mirror that of the (as yet unamended) process for applying for union recognition. 

But just as tellingly, if an employer fails to observe an access agreement or a CAC-imposed arrangement, there is no means for compelling the employer to comply. A union can make another reference to the CAC to have a financial penalty imposed upon the recalcitrant employer, but this is payable to the Government and not the union.

This means that the to-be-welcomed reforms of the statutory union recognition procedure are gravely undermined by putting obstacles in the way of taking advantage of the reforms. In other words, employers will still be able to freely practice anti-unionism in order to stop unions meeting the reduced thresholds for union recognition. Union recognition is essential for carrying out collective bargaining on pay and other terms and conditions. We know from the 1970s that it is the coverage of collective bargaining on wages – around 80% – that made that decade the most equal in economic terms by social class that Britain had ever been.

These reforms include deleting the current requirements for unions to (i) have the support of at least 40% of all those entitled to vote in the proposed bargaining unit in a recognition ballot and its replacing by the requirement of a simple majority of those voting to win the ballot, and (ii) to demonstrate in an application to the CAC that it is likely to win a recognition ballot (by worker support via a petition or by membership density) and replacing this with the requirement that the union only need to show a minimum of 10% membership in the proposed bargaining unit for the application for recognition to be accepted and progressed to the next stage of adjudication.

This is typical of Labour – essentially giving with one hand and taking away with the other or representing two steps forward and one step back.

Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of the ‘Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero’ (Manchester University Press, 2024), reviewed here on Labour Hub.

Gregor Gall will be spealing alongside Maria Exall on Thursday 12 December, at 6pm at an online briefing for trade union activists: Employment Rights Bill: what’s the latest, what should we be fighting for? Register to attend here.

Online briefing for trade union activists: Employment Rights Bill: what’s the latest, what should we be fighting for?

SPEAKERS: Gregor Gall and Maria Exall

Thursday 12 December, 6pm