Latest editorial
Amazon staff members on a GMB union picket line outside the online retailer's site in Coventry, as they take part in a strike in their long-running dispute over pay, March 19, 2024
LABOUR’S historic workers’ rights revolution has “more holes than Swiss cheese” allowing bosses to continue exploiting workers, unions warned yesterday as the Employment Rights Bill landed in Parliament.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said the much-anticipated 149-page Bill stops short of making work pay and “ties itself up in knots trying to avoid what was promised.”
Caveats means it fails to ban fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts, and watered-down rules on giving workers access to unions will hinder their ability to fight for better pay and conditions through collective bargaining.
Labour’s long-promised Act has scraped through the Lords. While the law marks a step forward, its lack of collective rights leaves workers short-changed — and sets the stage for a renewed campaign for an Employment Rights Bill #2, argues TONY BURKE
Labour must not allow unelected members of the upper house to erode a single provision of the Employment Rights Bill, argues ANDY MCDONALD MP
The Bill addresses some exploitation but leaves trade unions heavily regulated, most workers without collective bargaining coverage, and fails to tackle the balance of power that enables constant mutation of bad practice, write KEITH EWING and LORD JOHN HENDY KC
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR