Category: UK Employment Rights

For information.

Matt Wrack General Secretary of the FBU and President of the TUC, Paul Nowak TUC General Secretary, Sharon Graham of Unite push back on ‘changes’ to New Deal For Workers.

Labour will face a “hostile reaction” from unions if the UK opposition party announces a further dilution of its proposed worker’s rights policy, the president of the Trades Union Congress Matt Wrack told the FT.

The General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, told the Financial Times there should be “no rolling back” of Labour’s “New Deal for Working People”. “My message is very clear, no rolling back . . . if there is any more rolling back on the New Deal, they can expect a hostile reaction to it,” he said.

“People are not willing to just give up on this or retreat simply because Labour is the only show in town.” Wrack issued his warning after the Financial Times revealed on Wednesday that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party is set to unveil a weakened version of its employee rights package to ease business concerns.

Sharon Graham, General Secretary of Unite the Union, warned Labour that it needed to move quickly on Britain’s sub-standard employment rights. “If Labour do not explicitly recommit to what they have already pledged, namely that the New Deal for Workers will be delivered in full within the first 100 days of office, then a red line will be crossed,” she said.

“It would be normal, and often a legal requirement, for a government to have statutory consultation on its new legislation. The current government has often failed to consult and has been dragged through courts as a result,” said Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the TUC.

He added: “The unions expect Labour to deliver this programme.”

Mick Lynch, RMT General Secretary said: “Any dilution of the New Deal for workers is wholly unacceptable. Labour must not bend the knee to corporate greed and instead find its voice and values by representing the interests of working people in government.

“The New Deal for workers is popular amongst trades unionists and is an asset at the ballot box. “Working people need a Labour government that will protect them from the excesses of business, not one that kowtows to the vested interests of the super-rich.

“Any attempt to water down this popular policy will be met with a robust response from the entire trade union movement.”

FT comment: Shadow ministers are now set to embark on an attempt to persuade trade union leaders to accept the revised package, with a meeting scheduled for two weeks’ time, according to Labour and union figures.

They will argue that despite the consultations and revised language the essence of the package is broadly the same as before, they said.

Starmer earlier this week during the Usdaw union conference in Blackpool said: “We will not be watering down the New Deal For Working People.”

The TUCs special task force report on Artificial intelligence and Employment Rights Bill was launched at the TUC Congress House in London on April 18th. Comprising of the TUC, the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, unions academics and employment rights specialists the task force was set up to try to secure proper regulation of AI and algorithmic management in order to halt the UKs tech sector from becoming the ‘wild west’ of the economy.

You can download the full report with the draft bill here.

The report makes a number of key recommendations including a  legal requirement  on employers to consult unions on the use of ‘high risk’ and intrusive forms of AI in the workplace; a legal right for job seekers and workers to have a human review of decisions made by AI systems so they can challenge AI decisions that are unfair and discriminatory; amendments to the Equality Act to guard against discriminatory algorithms; protections against unfair dismissal by AI; a prohibition on some uses of emotion recognition technology and a right to a personalised explanation of high-risk risk decisions made by AI Workers in the UKs media, digital and tech sector, accounting for over 2 million jobs will be on the AI frontline.

One of the key problems is that union membership in the tech sector remains stubbornly low in many countries, with a diverse employment base –  from large corporations to small start ups – many with precarious and third party employment.

From the 1980s onwards unions tried to recruit new members in tech areas by setting up specialist ‘associations’ to attract tech workers or using high profile  campaigns imported from USA where ‘start up unions’ such alliance@ibm (which joined the Communication Workers of America) in global companies. What sounded good failed to achieve mass union membership after years of grinding management opposition, and ‘re-balancing the workforce’.

But maybe things have turned the corner.

In 2023 workers at the Swedish fin-tech company Klarna workers demanded representation and collective bargaining by joining Unionen. The company told the workforce collective bargaining ‘did not fit their business model’. The Unionen union organised immediate strike action and 5000 workers in Stockholm won union recognition and a collective agreement.

In the USA workers in the video gaming company Sega of America followed Raven Software, Blizzard Albany, ZeniMax, and game developer Tender Claws in winning union recognition. AEGIS-CWA  (Allied Employees Guild Improving SEGA – Communication Workers Of America) organised across Sega facilities including workers in marketing, product development and sales  to build membership and making it now the largest video game union in the USA.

In Romania Sindicatul IT Timișoara (SITT the Romanian IT Union) now represents 3,000 tech and outsourced workers at Alcatel-Lucent, Wipro, Accenture and Alto and were helped in organising by the European union federation Uni Europa.

In  the UK the CWU via the United Tech and Allied Workers Union Branch are organising workers in Apple stores; the white collar union Prospect (who’s General Secretary Mike Clancy is the TUC’s lead spokesperson on AI) has launched a tech sector and Unite’s London Digital and Tech branch has seen a membership boost since 2023.

In January of this year Unite members employed at Seagate, the Springtown (Derry, Northern Ireland) manufacturer of external hard drives voted overwhelmingly for trade union recognition with Unite. 540 workers at the company were involved in multi-year campaign at the company and Unite’s organising department.

The ballot followed a long battle – the statutory process for workers voting on union recognition took over a year.

In the run up to the ballot, the company brought in union busters one of whom had previously been engaged by Amazon in union-busting campaigns in the USA. The company eventually negotiated a recognition agreement with Unite.

James Bowen the secretary of Unite London Digital and Tech branch told me: “The branch had doubled in size over due to organising in ‘big tech’ firms such as Google. We’ve also grown at firms where we were well-established, such as Voyix and Atleos thanks to the work of our reps during pay negotiations. We are recruiting members from a diverse range of companies such as Accenture, the BBC, Cap Gemini and Computacenter.”

The branch organised protests at Google at their Kings Cross HQ in London over redundancies which gained a national profile – and increased union membership. 2023 was a pivitol year with over a quarter of a million workers in tech industries globally laid off. So far in 2024 there have been lay offs at Pixar, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and TikTok among others. Microsoft’s 1,900 global layoffs which began in early 2023 has made tech workers ‘union conscious’  The fact is they are no different to other workers – they join unions for protection and representation, and to find collective and just solutions to problems.” And the good news Bowen says is “that members are keeping up their membership even when the threat of lay off’s recedes.”

He says AI will be a major challenge: “AI can replace a real person and workers become concerned for their jobs. Service desk, first line roles which are heavily scripted can be replaced by an online chat bot. AI can be used to write code, reducing the number of software developers required so there are fears over job security.”  And there are fears over AI discrimination: “People have biases and this impacts the many choices that are made when building and training an AI whose purpose is to make decisions which impacts people’s lives. There’s a good argument to be made that AI should not make any management decisions.”

The branch are also running meetings for tech workers on AI with speakers from Equity, the performing arts and entertainment union, on the impact of AI on voice-over artists.

“Clare Vernade an ex-member of ours who now teaches ‘machine learning’ has done a session and were are happy to share our experiences and the video of Clare’s presentation is available on our site. Other Unite reps have been in touch with us wanting to discuss how we are handling AI”.

‘The most important industrial action case for decades”, UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea said after the Supreme Court ruled that employers cannot discipline workers who take part in legal  industrial action.

Judges in the Supreme Court have told employers they’ll no longer be able to discipline their staff for taking part in legal strike action in a UK Supreme Court ruling today.

UNISON took the case on behalf of care worker Fiona Mercer. The judgment follows a two-day hearing in December.

UNISON took the case to the Supreme Court to overturn an earlier Court of Appeal decision.

The union had argued this had left the UK in breach of international law and striking employees without proper protection. The Supreme Court judges were scathing of the government’s failure to provide the minimum protection UK workers should have been granted, says UNISON. 

UK law prevents employers from sacking employees who take legal strike action, but until today, it offered no protection to anyone subsequently picked upon for walking out in a dispute. Fiona had originally taken a case against her then employer, Alternative Futures Group (AFG), a charity based in the north west of England, to an employment tribunal in 2020. She had been involved in a dispute over AFG’s plans to cut payments to care staff who did sleep-in shifts.

Fiona’s employer wasn’t happy, singled her out, suspended her and barred her from going into work or contacting colleagues during the action. Fiona’s case wound up at an employment appeal tribunal (EAT) in 2021, which found in her favour. It said UK law must protect her from being victimised for going on strike. That should have been it, says UNISON, as the charity had then decided it wasn’t prepared to proceed any further.

But the then business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng intervened and took the case to the Court of Appeal, which subsequently decided to reverse the EAT decision in March 2022.

Back to where it started, UNISON sought permission on behalf of Fiona to take the case to the highest court in the land, and this led to the judgment handed down today.

UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea said: “This is the most important industrial action case for decades. It’s a victory for every employee who might one day want to challenge something bad or unfair their employer has done. “Rogue bosses won’t like it one bit. They’ll no longer be able to punish or ill-treat anyone who dares to take strike action to try to solve any problems at work.

“No one strikes on a whim. There are many legal hoops to be jumped through first. But when a worker decides to walk out, they should be able to do so, safe in the knowledge they won’t be victimised by a spiteful boss.

“The government must now close this loophole promptly. It won’t cost any money and isn’t difficult to do. Today is a day to celebrate.”

Fiona Mercer said: “I’m delighted at today’s outcome. Although it won’t change the way I was treated, it means irresponsible employers will now think twice before behaving badly towards their unhappy staff. If they single strikers out for ill-treatment, they’ll now be breaking the law.”