By Adis Sehic and Evie Breese - 16 October 2024
After much debate about whether the government would meet its self-imposed 100-day deadline for presenting a new and comprehensive Employment Rights Bill, this greatly anticipated piece of legislation was published just in time.
In a new briefing, we’ve taken the time to reflect on how the bill might affect the most vulnerable workers in our society - the millions of people with worker status, the falsely self-employed, the non-unionised, seasonal workers, overseas domestic workers, and the thousands of migrants tied to their employers - and highlight where it needs to go further.
The UK is currently a high-insecurity and low-regulation labour market, with millions of people on contracts that provide zero stability, and weak enforcement against exploitative employers. The bill offers a tentatively positive framework for upgrading the rights of millions of workers across the country.
We welcome the government’s decision to consult on some of the key parts of the bill, including the length of probationary periods, a single worker status, and cancellation notice for shift workers, to ensure that stakeholders are given appropriate time to feed into the development of complex changes. The government has a real opportunity for vast positive change, and the rights of millions are at stake. We look forward to feeding the insight gained by our legal advisers, our primary research, and policy analyses into these consultations as representatives of migrant and disadvantaged workers.
We are calling for the government to implement a number of realistic and practical amendments to the Employment Rights Bill to ensure that it is as inclusive as possible for the most precarious workers in our labour market.
Our five key recommendations:
Probationary periods must be proportionate. For many individuals on fixed-term contracts, or migrant workers on fixed-term visas, a probationary period of nine months would offer little to no extra protections. Probationary periods should be proportionate to the individual’s contract length, with a carve-out for migrant seasonal workers - who receive 6-month fixed-term visas - and are already highly vulnerable to exploitation.
Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) must include those currently excluded. While pregnant workers are beneficiaries of the bill as it will now be unlawful to dismiss them within six months of their return to work, lower-paid pregnant workers remain excluded from, or receive lower levels, of SMP. This is because if they fall ill in the “relevant period” before giving birth, and they fail to meet the minimum earnings threshold, their SMP calculation is affected. Further amendments are required to address this discriminatory loophole.
Guaranteed hours should be extended to agency workers. To prevent unscrupulous employers from subverting the spirit of the bill by engaging more agency workers, they too must benefit from guaranteed hours. Furthermore, when there are disputes over contract limitations, it should be within the remit of the new Fair Work Agency to resolve them.
The Fair Work Agency must work for migrants, too. Migrants and their representatives should be part of the Advisory Board to the Secretary of State and Fair Work Agency. Many migrants are scared to report labour market abuses out of fear that their migration status will be shared with the Home Office, which opens the door to hostile environment policies or removal. Therefore there must be an information firewall to prevent the sharing of workers’ immigration status with the Home Office when they report labour exploitation.
The gap in corporate accountability must be addressed to support labour rights enforcement. Address the problem of company directors evading responsibility for exploitation through company structures by introducing individual liability for the payment of tribunal awards or settlement amounts. In addition, the new Fair Work Agency should be adequately resourced and designed to support the Employment Tribunal system, which is currently woefully undersupported.
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