The Employment Rights Act: what it means and where to go next

Activist and author Ian Allinson assesses the new legislation, and argues that while there are some positives, workers must focus on local action to build rank-and-file power.

The response from union leaders to the passing of the Employment Rights Act 2025 has been overwhelmingly ecstatic. The Trades Union Congress called it ‘a giant leap forward’. UNISON called it ‘game changing’. The Public and Commercial Services union called it ‘a win for workers’ rights’. The Communication Workers’ Union welcomed ‘a genuine improvement’ while demanding more. Unite’s Sharon Graham has been very critical, describing the amendments as leaving the legislation a ‘shell of its former self’.

The Act, which was key to mobilising union support for Labour at the last general election, is a step forward, though implementation is staged under transitional regulations.

• From 18 December 2025, Minimum Service Levels rules which tried to make workers  scab on their own strikes were removed, as were higher industrial action ballot turnout thresholds for ‘important public services’.
• 18 February 2026 sees more changes come into effect, including cutting the notice for industrial action from 14 days to 10, removing ‘picket supervisors’ and extending the validity of industrial action ballots from six months to 12 months.
• 6 April 2026 sees a third set of changes, including allowing unions to ballot members electronically rather than by post, simplifying procedures to win union recognition, improvements to parental rights, better sick pay, greater penalties for employers who fail to consult over collective redundancies, and better protection for workers reporting sexual harassment. Voluntary employer action plans around menopause and gender pay gaps will create opportunities for campaigning.
• October 2026 should see more changes, but these are not fully clear yet. These are expected to include giving unions limited rights to access workplaces, improved rights for union reps, improved rights for workers against being penalised for taking part in industrial action, some watered down protections against ‘fire and rehire’, new rules against ‘two tier’ workforces on outsourced public sector contracts, reinstating employer liability for harassment by third parties, and strengthening employers’ duty to prevent harassment.
• 2027 should see more changes including improvements to laws around blacklisting of trade unionists and closing a loophole where employers avoid collective consultation over redundancies by dividing them into small groups.

Consultations have been published on electronic and workplace balloting, union access to workplaces, pregnant women and new mothers, and bereavement. Union reps should be planning now to campaign and negotiate agreements on all the issues where the Act does deliver change. This can ensure the law is a minimum we try to exceed rather than allowing employers to interpret and apply it as they see fit. ACAS have published a summary of the changes, though it says ‘unions will need a simple majority to vote for industrial action’ from February 2026, wrongly implying that the ballot turnout thresholds are being abolished.¹

The failure to set a timetable to repeal the requirement for 50 per cent turnout in industrial action ballots is very bad indeed. Since it was introduced in the Trade Union Act 2016, these anti-democratic rules have prevented millions of workers taking lawful industrial action, particularly in the giant bargaining units in health, local government and education. Labour’s manifesto promised to implement its ‘New Deal for Working People’ ‘in full’ – this is one of many examples where the government has broken that promise. 

Unions should be demanding the full implementation of the Act, including scrapping the turnout thresholds. A huge effort is going to be required to ensure that the introduction of electronic balloting boosts turnout so that millions of workers regain their ability to strike lawfully. The government is using electronic balloting to justify not timetabling the end of the ballot turnout threshold. No doubt Labour wants to keep dangling this carrot in front of union leaders in the hope of discouraging effective opposition.

Much else that was promised has been lost or watered down. Those classed as workers or self-employed are still denied many of the rights that come with employee status. Employers will still be able to unfairly dismiss employees in their first six months. Enforcement remains generally inadequate. The vast majority of anti-union legislation remains. Many, including the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom and the Institute of Employment Rights, are calling for a second Employment Rights Bill, but the prospect of Starmer’s Labour delivering this seem vanishingly small.

Turnout and bargaining unit size

A bargaining unit is a defined group of workers that one or more employers recognise as being represented by one or more unions, through which collective agreements can be negotiated. Most unions have a decent record of passing ballot thresholds in small bargaining units but struggle in bigger ones.

In a small bargaining unit, representatives elected by the workers themselves are usually involved in negotiations, with or without officers employed by a union. The reps are close to the issues, can communicate with members relatively easily, and workers can make them accountable or replace them without too much difficulty.

The bigger the bargaining unit, the more likely it is that negotiations will be carried out by paid union officers rather than reps, that negotiators will be remote from the issues affecting workers, that communication will be poor and accountability difficult. No wonder that it is harder to engage members in big bargaining units and turnout tends to be lower.

Union retreat and centralised bargaining

In the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, workers in many key industries, including mining and engineering, had a large part of their pay determined by direct negotiation between their own elected shop steward (rep) and their own manager, who negotiated frequently over piece-work rates (payments per amount produced). In engineering, the national agreement set a floor, and most workers were paid far above that through local bargaining. This hyper-local bargaining gave shop stewards a very important role. The relationship between workers and their shop steward was very important. Communication and accountability could be informal and frequent. 

During World War One, with strikes illegal and unemployment very low, these conditions encouraged the development of a rank-and-file shop stewards movement. In the long economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, shop stewards led lots of (often successful) strikes which were usually too small or short to appear in government statistics. The majority were unofficial, meaning they weren’t sanctioned by any union.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the long economic boom began to falter, Tony Cliff and Colin Barker argued (see, for example, Incomes Policy and The Employers’ Offensive) that this was forcing employers to resist workers more strongly, that sectional action was no longer sufficient, and that a new rank-and-file movement was needed to coordinate action. Their political group, the International Socialists (IS), made a major contribution to its development. This wasn’t just a positive thing for trade unionism. The IS saw a rank-and-file movement as part of their strategy for revolution. Cliff used the analogy of three cogs. The small cog was the revolutionary party, but this was too small to move the large cog of the trade union movement. A rank-and-file movement made up of the militants in different industries could be an intermediate cog, helping win the working class to revolution.

In 1977 the IS became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and by the late 1970s recognised that working-class advance had gone into reverse under the Labour government, in what Cliff called the ‘downturn’, though union membership continued to climb until 1979. Amongst a long list of other factors, Cliff identified the changing role of stewards due to productivity deals, which he had warned against in 1970. In 1979 he wrote:

Ten years ago the book ‘The Employers’ Offensive’, subtitled ‘Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them’, highlighted the ruling class determination to stop wage drift and transform shopfloor relations by removing stewards from effective direct influence on take-home pay, thus weakening the support they had from their constituents.

The Donovan Report on trade unions argued that the abolition of piece-work would undermine the autonomy of shop stewards and would help the unions to integrate the stewards into the union machine, so that they might better control their activities in the interests of managerial order. The main target was clear – the factory floor organisation.

The aim of the Donovan Report was the integration of the shop stewards into a streamlined union machine, into a plant consensus. This process of integration could be helped by greater legal and managerial discipline. Order had also to be brought into the working of the unions: ‘Certain features of trade union structure and government have helped to inflate the power of work-groups and shop stewards.’

Among the institutional changes proposed by the Donovan Commission was, first of all, the substitution of factory agreements for industry-wide agreements. The negotiation of piece-rates makes for permanent activity in the shop and hence for very close relations between the shop steward and the workers he or she represents.

The elimination of piece-working, especially if it is connected with the transference of bargaining to a company-wide level, necessarily takes away the power of shop stewards to seriously affect the wage packets of the workers they represent. This applies to all industries from engineering to the docks to the mines. The shop stewards become integrated into the union machine and incorporated into management.

Looking back 47 years later, the observations about the disempowering of shop stewards and their integration into the union machine have been strongly borne out, even if ‘incorporation into management’ is the exception rather than the rule.

Bargaining has become highly centralised – often at industry or employer level rather than workplace level, let alone work-group level. This has contributed to a dramatic narrowing of the scope of bargaining: the range of topics it covers. Centralised bargaining inevitably focuses on ‘contractual relations’ – things like pay and hours – and neglects ‘managerial relations’ such as work allocation and bullying. A good shop steward can challenge a manager’s decisions or behaviour, but such issues won’t come up in national bargaining conducted by paid union officers.

As unions retreated under Thatcher, centralised bargaining held a certain attraction for them. As a general rule, centralisation favours whichever side is in retreat. Employers in the 1970s wanted to tame shop stewards who were pushing forward on a hyper-local basis. From the 1980s, many trade unionists wanted national bargaining to prevent weaker groups being picked off.

Centralised bargaining has now prevailed for decades and has contributed to union organisation being hollowed out. Management and workers often share a narrow view of what is a ‘union issue’ because the scope of bargaining is so narrow. Many workers experience ‘once a year trade unionism’ – hearing little relevant from their union outside pay bargaining cycles or during restructuring. Few experience ‘everyday trade unionism’ where every management decision or omission is subject to collective discussion, decision and possible reaction. In many unions, reps are elected across a whole workplace rather than from a specific work group, team or department – weakening their link to the workers they represent.

Understanding the impact of bargaining level on workplace organisation has helped me explain why my own experience of organising at work has been so unusual. For a long time I couldn’t understand why so few other socialists managed to get their workmates out on strike, to coordinate action, and so on. Most of my life I worked in a private sector company with local bargaining, which meant I was directly involved in negotiations and in leading campaigns. Paid union officers were not involved most of the time. As we built national organisation and action, we maintained a very democratic and participatory approach. More recently I worked in the public sector, but in a relatively small bargaining unit (with three employers and two unions). This was harder and more bureaucratic, but as a worker I was still able to participate in negotiations and shape campaigns. In general, the left is very concentrated in education (with huge bargaining units), the not-for-profit sector (often with little power or employed by movement organisations where people are reluctant to fight) or law (with little union organisation). No wonder most other socialists were finding it harder than me.

Unions haven’t broken into any substantial new areas since 1979. The retreat of unionisation to the public sector, privatised public services and some pockets in manufacturing and elsewhere means that unions are often stuck defending existing agreements, pay rates and conditions. This is one reason why the work of ‘micro unions’ such as UVW and IWGB, which mainly organise new groups of poorly-paid workers, often seems so exciting to socialists. These are workers who are fighting for better pay and conditions, with no past achievements to defend. The case studies in Troublemaking by Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock bring out the energy of these offensive struggles, which have a dynamic that is very different to most disputes.

I have previously focused on the low level of strike action when explaining why current conditions are far less favourable for a new rank-and-file movement of the type built around World War One or in the 1970s. It seems unlikely that we will return to piecework and the hyper-localised bargaining which prevailed through much of the twentieth century and this is also an important factor. This doesn’t mean that a rank-and-file orientation isn’t essential. Understanding factors which make rank-and-file organising hard can help us sustain efforts to advance it in difficult circumstances, and can encourage us to build hybrid forms of organisation of a ‘militant minority’ with a rank-and-file orientation (an approach I’ve been involved in pursuing through Troublemakers At Work) rather than a pure rank-and-file approach.

No social revolution is possible without workplace action playing a major role – because of its power, because work is such a big part of our lives, and because social revolution would mean tearing up the boss-worker relationship. However, mass struggles and revolutions since about 1989 have been much less workplace-centred. If conditions are less favourable for a rank-and-file movement, Cliff’s ‘three cogs’ strategy is unlikely to be the route to successful revolution. Rather than workplace struggle being completely paramount, we need convergence between struggles against exploitation and oppression, and between those in workplaces and communities, rather than counterposing them

Strategy

If the centralisation of bargaining has done so much damage, what should we do?

Socialists should reject the widespread idea that what’s useful or ethical should be a big factor in choosing a job. This has contributed to an over concentration in movement jobs, academia, the not-for-profit sector and in public services. Any job can give us a useful place to organise our fellow workers and some present greater opportunities to build working-class power than others. It’s not our paid work that’s our main contribution to society, it’s our efforts to organise against capitalism.

In a context of austerity, anti-union legislation, weak union organisation and the threat of Reform taking over local and national government, breaking up existing national bargaining units could risk throwing weaker groups of workers to the wolves.

We can learn from an exception which proves the rule about big bargaining units. The Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) in Royal Mail had a record of very high strike ballot turnouts until 2023 in a national bargaining unit of well over 100,000. This isn’t just down to effective campaigns. Posties had a strong tradition of ‘everyday trade unionism’. Within the national bargaining unit there was extensive and frequent local bargaining over a wide range of issues, giving local reps real power and strong connections with the members they represented.

The National Education Union (NEU) traditionally relied on district-based branches, a structure dating back to when local authorities controlled schools. For some years it has been building up its network of school reps, and this has been accelerated by both the growth of Multi-Academy Trusts and the NEU’s energetic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Part of its strategy since then has been ‘lighting fires’, by which they mean encouraging local disputes.

In any large bargaining unit, we should be looking for local issues to agitate and organise around, and pushing for action. As well as having the potential to win on local issues, this can build workers’ participation and self-activity, which in turn can help build turnout in any ballots across a big bargaining unit.

However, local action will rarely be sufficient for workers to win all they want. In the public sector, where big bargaining units are a particular problem, an individual employer may face central government funding constraints. In the private sector, workers may worry about the viability of their employer in the face of competitors or the power of a big parent company to withstand local action. In the third sector, funding organisations may hold the purse strings. To achieve big changes we will usually need big struggles. Getting a fight going locally to win on some issues and trying to widen it and coordinate action with other groups is a far more plausible route to mass action that can win on big issues than waiting for the national union bureaucracy to lead effective action.

Pushing for local action enables us to take up a wide range of issues rather than having a narrow contractual focus. This makes it much easier to challenge oppression, to make connections with issues affecting workers outside the workplace, and to tackle the talking points used by the far right to build support amongst working-class people.

At the same time, we should continue to demand that national unions run effective campaigns that stand a chance of beating the ballot thresholds – particularly if electronic balloting makes this slightly easier. We are in a better position to do this if we have high participation and a proven ability to fight in our own workplaces. This is far more powerful than ritual denunciations of the bureaucracy from activists who are easily dismissed as disconnected from their workmates.

It can be useful to stand for election to some union positions. An election can allow you to put arguments to lots of union members. Holding a position can do the same, and allow you to make workers’ arguments within the union structure. But unless this is rooted in building power in your own workplace and building networks of rank-and-file activists who can hold you to account, this is no more than ‘new faces in old places’ and will change you rather than help you win change.

Ian Allinson is author of Workers Can Win: A Guide to Organising At Work and one of the national coordinators of Troublemakers At Work. He is currently involved in the dispute at Transport for Greater Manchester.

1. There has been some confusion about whether or not the 50 per cent turnout ballot threshold is being repealed. This is covered in section 68 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA), which removes section 226 subsection 2 (a) (iia) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (TULRCA). ERA section 69 deals with the additional thresholds for important public services by amending TULRCA section 226 subsection 2 (a) (iii). ERA section 159 provides the dates for each change to take effect. Section 69 took effect immediately when the Act was passed. Section 68 is not listed, so is covered by section 159 subsection 3, which states ‘The other provisions of this Act come into force in accordance with regulations made by the Secretary of State’. The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 1 and Transitional and Saving Provisions) Regulations 2026 were introduced on 5 January 2026. They do not include any timescale for the implementation of ERA section 68. ↩︎