I RECENTLY received a very large box from Amazon. When I tore it open it was just a small set of paintbrushes which I had forgotten I had ordered. The rest was just packing paper.

The letdown and feeling of being slightly mocked, if not conned, reminded me of how union builders felt in 1999, when we finally got to open up the big shiny gift box containing the New Labour Employment Bill, only to find quite small changes largely unenforceable

Since the election in July we have been bombarded with repeat announcements that government still intends to end the Minimum Service Levels Act, improve access to workplaces for unions, end fire and rehire, grant a right to disconnect and so on as set out in the New Deal for Working People. 

On the face of it, all to be supported, encouraged and welcomed by union builders of course. 

But in 1997 and faced with a similar Labour majority, union negotiators took their eyes off the ball in terms of the detail of enforcing promised new employment rights. The result was new “rights at work” overspun for the consumption of “Mondeo Man” and “Worcester Woman” that in the end few working people noticed or could actually benefit from. 

The 1999 Employment Act ended up with more holes in it than a Swiss cheese and poor enforcement sabotaged its potential value both for individuals and collectively.

As a result, after 13 years of New Labour, by 2010 the decline in union membership had accelerated and not slowed, and now, a quarter of a century after the 1999 Employment Act, huge parts of the UK jobs market remains an employment rights free zone. 

For too many low-paid workers New Labour’s minimum wage quickly become the maximum wage from which many still find it impossible to break free. 

Fire and rehire is a standard way of life for many workers, who face lectures about their “living wage” but know they can’t live on it and certainly not without in-work benefits or foodbanks. 

And as tiny hours-on-demand contracts of employment feel compulsory to many, joining and organising a union seems a risky gamble. Being active in your union clearly enjoys less social protection than going to vote, but feels to be a much more serious political act. 

There are millions of experts on all these issues working in warehouses, kitchens, schools, refuse trucks, offices and from home who have been closed out of the politics that affects them all their lives. A party to which they are never invited.  Instead they must watch with their faces pressed against the window as self-promoting “union experts” and business lobbyists lecture and make decisions on their lives.

The missing ingredient between 1997 and 1999 was the voice of union builders in government, and unions stand ready to fix this for Labour. 

But this also requires an understanding in government that not everyone who has ever worked for a union or been active in one can be properly described as a union builder. 

Union builders are the people in workplaces who have the job every day of making employment policy work and making sure working people know their rights and can access them — and build their collective strength to improve on them. Employment rights in the New Deal should provide the floor on which union builders can start their work rather than the ceiling of our aspirations. 

Right now Labour should focus-group these people more than friendly academics, lawyers, or swing voters, business leaders, and economists. 

They would find out how new employment rights could be enforced at work proactively without further enriching lawyers and HR consultants in court hearings after those rights have been breached. 

Labour ministers are already being surrounded and swamped by favoured insiders and corporate lobbyists posing as experts in the world of work and need union builders’ voices to help them stay grounded in working people’s lived realities.

Why not bring in the leaders of the Amazon recognition campaign defeated a week before the election to find out how the rules are flawed, for example? Why not bring in zero and tiny-hours workers to hear about how on-demand shifts via text message take away their rights to a contract of employment? 

Why not hear from union builders about how the terror of not being invited back for another shift defeats their desire to form a union with their colleagues? Why not ask safety reps what the problems are with waiting for an accident at work to happen before anything is done? 

Why not ask a school meals worker or street sweeper whose job has been sold half a dozen times already about the lack of protection of their rights? Why not ask women and BAME union builders about the failure of equal pay law to deliver justice? 

Why not talk to the millions of bogus and forced self-employed workers about how they can get new rights to earnings security?  

Better still, let’s organise our own focus groups and invite our new government ministers to come and listen.

Despite their role in making employment rights work, union builders’ voices are seldom heard loudly and clearly enough by Labour politicians and sometimes not even within trade unions themselves. With experience of New Labour in 1999, union builders cannot settle for any more empty boxes, pantomime horses or social media glove puppets when it comes to workers’ rights to organise, defend and progress their interests. 

The election is over and well and truly won. It’s time to swap our kid gloves for boxing gloves and secure rights we can use instead of promises we can’t.

Martin Smith is former head of organising at GMB.