Winning a New Deal for Working People

Peterborough Trades Union Council notes that Labour’s 2024 Employment Rights Bill (ERB) contains elements of the New Deal for Working People including individual day one rights for workers plus some restrictions on zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire.

We welcome Labour’s repeal of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, 2023 and the ballot thresholds, ballot paper wording prescriptions and appointment of picket supervisors introduced by the Tory Trade Union Act, 2016. However, we note with concern that under Labour’s ERB while notice periods for industrial action are reduced from fourteen to seven days, requirements for trade unions to give notice of ballots and to identify numbers of workers, workplaces and categories remain in place.

Labour’s renamed New Deal (Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay) does not address the fundamental power imbalance between workers and employers in UK law including the absence of a legal right to strike, the ban on the right to take sympathy action criticised by the ILO in its 2023 report on the P&O Ferries scandal, and the ban on so-called political strikes introduced by Tory governments in the 1980s. We deplore Labour’s failure to reinstate workplace ballots and remove voting thresholds. We demand that online balloting be legalised to recognise modern working practices, and that hybrid voting be allowed, where appropriate, using the trade union’s discretion. 

We further note that key elements of the New Deal for Working People have been dropped from Labour’s ERB, such as the introduction of sectoral collective bargaining across the economy through Fair Pay Agreements other than for school support staff in England and adult social care workers, with the caveats that these will not be collective agreements “as normally understood”.

We condemn those Labour MPs, donors and business interests who lobby Labour ministers and officials for the New Deal to be limited and scaled back. We believe the New Deal and Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay must be a beginning, not the end of a process of rebuilding workers’ collective rights in Britain.

Peterborough Trades Union Council agrees:

1. to campaign for the extension of the New Deal through Fair Pay Agreements (sectoral collective bargaining) wherever unions believe them to be appropriate and necessary;
2. to support legal and parliamentary amendments to the 2024 Employment Rights Bill that seek to restore and strengthen trade union collective rights;
3. to call for further legislation within the lifetime of the current Labour government to establish a legal right to strike and remove undemocratic bans on sympathy strikes;
4. to encourage union branches, committees and councils to affiliate to the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom http://www.tradeunionfreedom.co.uk/