The UK government wants its sweeping reforms of workers’ rights to make a visible difference to voters’ lives — preferably in time for May’s crucial local elections.
But UK employers view the long list of new obligations flowing from the Employment Rights Act with more trepidation. With unemployment near a 10-year high, and the youth jobless rate climbing farther into double digits, they say a raft of measures intended to give employees more security and stronger bargaining rights will simply worsen the chill on hiring.
“Given where the labour market is now, even if you were to agree this is the right thing to do, you wouldn’t do it now,” says Anna Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors. “It’s really freaking businesses out, because it’s so much all at once, a year after big increases in employment costs and when there is still a lot of [geopolitical] uncertainty.”
The legislation, which reached the statute book in December, encompasses scores of measures intended to bolster the role of trade unions, upgrade existing protections for workers and strengthen enforcement of the rules. But it will take up to two years to thrash out the details of more complex reforms, in regulations or codes of conduct, and for employers to prepare.
A few changes, loosening the rules unions must follow to launch strike action, have already taken effect. A further set of changes will come into force in April — including a right for fathers to take paternity leave from their first...
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