The new Labour government is to introduce an Employment Rights Bill within its first 100 days as part of its plan to make work pay.
Announced in the King’s Speech on Wednesday 17 July, the plan will create a new partnership between business, trade unions and working people, inviting their views on how best to put the plans into practice.
The government will also implement a living wage that accounts for the cost of living and remove any age bands to ensure that every adult worker benefits.
The bill will deliver on policies set out in the Make Work Pay plan, which includes commitments to make parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day one of employment, remove the lower earnings limit for statutory sick pay to make it available to all workers, make flexible working the default from day one for all workers, and strengthening protections for new mothers by making it unlawful to dismiss a woman who has had a baby for six months after her return to work,
Other policies include banning zero-hour contracts and ensuring workers get reasonable notice of any shift changes, establishing a Fair Work Agency to strengthen enforcement of workplace rights, implementing a fair pay agreement in the adult social care sector, reinstating the School Support Staff Negotiating Body to establish terms and conditions and fair pay rates, and updating trade union legislation by removing restrictions on activity to ensure industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining.
Chris Rowley, professor emeritus of human resource management at Bayes Business School, said: “Labour’s vaunted pre-election promises in the area of work and employment are moving forwards as the New Deal for Working People, albeit with some nuances and roll back from earlier proclamations. By preventing managers exploiting labour costs in a death spiral of a drive to the bottom of competing by ever lower wages and the numerical flexibility of the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, it is to encourage competing by quality, value added and innovation, requiring skills, investment and long term perspectives and thinking.”
Tania Bowers, global public policy director at the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo), added: “The Employment Rights Bill and the launch of the Fair Work Agency are the primary and more urgent elements of the King’s Speech that the recruitment sector will be closely monitoring. There is an understandable level of trepidation from our members around the extent of the planned changes to workers’ rights and the impact these will have on temporary recruitment costs. There will need to be sufficient lead time to renegotiate contracts effectively as a result.”
