Simplification of trade union recognition confirmed in King’s Speech

Last week the new Labour Government delivered its first King’s Speech setting out an array of employment law reforms to be introduced within its first 100 days in what Labour says will be “the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation”. 

The King said: “My Government is committed to making work pay and will legislate to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights.” 

The background briefing notes to the Speech, published by the Prime Minister’s Office, provide more detail about the employment policies the Government intends to introduce in its Employment Rights Bill. There are no surprises and the list of measures marries up with Labour’s Manifesto promises. 

The details will emerge in the coming weeks when the government publishes a draft bill. Some of the planned reforms will happen quite quickly while others will be subject to a period of consultation meaning legislation will not appear until well into next year. Nonetheless, we have a good idea of what’s coming and employers would do well to get ready for it now. 

To that end, in the weeks following Rishi Sunak’s calling of the General Election on 4 July, we ran a series of webinars to help HR professionals and businesses prepare for what might lie ahead. Those Election Specials covered three key areas, namely:

- Worker status, protection, and rights

- Equality and family friendly laws; and

- Industrial relations and trade unions

In this programme we will take a look at Labour’s plans for industrial relations and trade unions. Our Head of Client Training Trish Embley hosted the webinars and earlier she joined my by video-link to discuss it: 

Trish Embley: “The key points in the trade union and industrial relations session centered really on first of all statutory recognition of a trade union. The main provision there that Labour are proposing is that if a trade union at the moment wanted to go to the Central Arbitration Committee for recognition to get statutory recognition, in their ballot they would obviously have to get majority support from employees, but that majority support would have to amount to at least 40% of the members in that business unit entitled to vote. What Labour are proposing is that that is relaxed so that it's just a simple majority. If there's a simple majority of those voting for recognition then the union gets statutory recognition. So, just to give a practical example, if you had a business unit with 100 people in it and the union holds a recognition ballot and 10 people vote and six vote in favour, then recognition would be granted. So that is six out of 100, resulting in the union getting statutory recognition. The other main headline is the repeal of the Trade Union Act 2016. Now, this put quite a few restrictions around notice that unions have to give of industrial action ballots. how long that ballot would last and the notification requirements. So, those controls would be relaxed. We did run polls on both of these points and we asked if there was any concern around, first of all, that simple majority that was all that was required for recognition. We've got a 75% response rate of yes to that and then the repeal of the Trade Union Act, and the relaxing of controls around balloting for industrial action, again, another 76% saying they were concerned about that.”

Joe Glavina: “So what are the action steps for HR professionals, Trish?”

Trish Embley: “There’s lot of work to be done here. Of all three areas it’s the trade union legislation that is the most complex and difficult and that is going to need a lot of work. So we hear a lot about Labour within its first 100 days are going to implement a lot of rights and when we speak to our colleagues who've got experience of being advisors, or working in Westminster, what they tell us is that in those first 100 days what we'll probably see are draft bills being published. Labour have committed to consulting extensively with all stakeholders, including businesses, so look out for that. Obviously, at Pinsent Masons we'll be issuing briefings as soon as we see details of these draft bills that will give us a bit more detail, and also we'll get a better idea for the timeframe. Again, our colleagues who've got experience of Westminster tell us it can take nine to 12 months to get a bill through parliament, and even longer, another 3 to 12 months, to get the fine detail in secondary legislation, the regulations that will set an awful lot of the detail.”

As Trish said, the government’s plan is to introduce the new Employment Rights Bill during the first 100 days of the new Government, so by mid-October, but that will just be a draft. It will take much longer to go through the legislative process, undergo consultation and  become an Act of Parliament. Nonetheless, what’s clear is that employees will have much more significant rights, and from an earlier stage in employment, and employers will need to adapt their policies and practices accordingly. We’ll have plenty more on that in the weeks and months ahead.

Incidentally, Trish has already talked to this programme about Labour’s plans for worker status, protection and improved rights, and equality and family-friendly laws. We’ve included links to both of those programmes in the transcript of this programme.

LINKS
- Link to Election Special webinars audio recordings
1 Worker status, protection, and rights
2 Equality and family friendly laws
3 Industrial relations and trade unions