Labour drop day one protection from unfair dismissal
The government have dropped their manifesto commitment to introduce a right to protection from unfair dismissal from day one on a job. Ministers have now said the right will now only be available to workers after six months.
Rights to sick pay and paternity leave will still be available from day one.
The government has said it has introduced the change to stop the changes being delayed in the house of Lords.
The TUC and some unions have accepted the change in order to ensure that the bill passes. However, Unite have said this will damage worker’s confidence.
Some Labour MPs have criticised the move.
Former employment rights minister Justin Madders MP has tweeted “It might be a compromise It might even be necessary to get the Bill passed asap But it most definitely is a manifesto breach.”
Andy McDonald said the move was “A complete betrayal.” and another unnamed MP questioned what the whipping situation is when it comes to voting in favour of manifesto breaches.
MORE TO COME.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
‘Day one rights were promised – Labour must deliver them’
The cost of living crisis has pushed millions of workers to the brink, and the government’s own figures show what working people have long known: wages have failed to keep pace with rising prices, rents and bills, while the labour share of national income has been in historic decline. In recent months, we have seen steps that begin to shift the dial—an overdue rise in the minimum wage, some improvements in public sector pay settlements, and the welcome decision to abolish the punitive two-child cap. But these measures, while important, are only the beginning of what must be a sustained effort to raise living standards.
Short-term income boosts will never be enough unless working people also have the power to secure better pay and conditions at their workplaces. That demands a rebalancing of rights—towards employees, and the trade unions who represent them—and a recognition that the current system allows far too many employers to exploit insecurity to drive down pay.
Central to that rebalancing is the principle of day one rights. It was one of the foundation stones of the New Deal for Working People— the programme developed with trade unions, first published in 2021, and reconfirmed repeatedly in the years and elections that followed. It is a principle backed by every senior Labour figure who has spoken on it, from Angela Rayner to Jonathan Reynolds to Peter Kyle, who as recently as September 2025 reaffirmed that unfair dismissal protections would be available from the first day on the job.
This commitment has always been about more than process. It is about tackling the most egregious abuses that occur in the shadows of precarious work: workers dismissed without reason days before qualifying for rights; employees pushed out when they raise complaints; unscrupulous employers exploiting zero-hours or insecure contracts to churn through staff at will. Day one unfair dismissal rights are not a threat to good employers—they are a safeguard against bad ones.
Yet, as Parliament reaches the final stages of the Employment Rights Bill, the government has resiled from this essential commitment, proposing instead a reduction of the qualifying period from two years to six months.
This is not day one rights. It is a half-way measure, and it falls far short of what was promised to workers in Labour’s manifesto.
This climb-down is particularly troubling given the government’s overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. When a reform is supported by the elected chamber, when it appeared explicitly in the manifesto on which that majority rests, and when every relevant Cabinet minister has publicly endorsed it, there is no justification for allowing the unelected House of Lords to dilute or dictate its content. The authority of the Commons must be respected—and a confident government should be prepared to assert that authority.
But there is a deeper concern. The Bill has been drafted with heavy reliance on secondary legislation, with at least a dozen—and potentially many more—consultations required before the detail of the reforms becomes law. Already, consultations on union access, unfair dismissal protections for pregnant workers, statutory bereavement leave, and the duty to inform workers of their rights are underway. Many more are expected. That means the essential shape of the reforms—on day one rights, on collective bargaining, on the single status of workers—remains unresolved.
If the government is willing to trim back manifesto commitments at the final moment of the primary legislation stage, it raises a serious red flag about what may happen when the real decisions are buried inside secondary regulations. Too many crucial questions—on the expansion of sectoral collective bargaining, on the long-promised single worker status—have already been pushed down the road. If this latest concession becomes a precedent, business lobby groups will not stop at day one rights. They will return for more—and some will hope to chip away at commitments the moment public attention moves on.
Trade unions will, of course, continue fighting for the strongest possible implementation when the consultations conclude and the regulations are drafted. They will do what they have always done: organise, negotiate, and advocate relentlessly for their members. But they cannot do it alone. They need partners in Parliament—Labour MPs who are prepared not just to vote for the New Deal for Working People, but to defend it, make the case for it, and challenge any attempt to water it down.
Workers have been promised the biggest upgrade in rights for a generation. They deserve the full delivery of those promises. And Labour MPs must make clear—inside government and out—that the commitments made to working people in 2021, in 2024, and ever since cannot be chipped away, hollowed out or traded off. Not now, and not in the secondary legislation still to come.
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