What changes to workers' rights mean for the Budget

Talk of year-long strikes is overblown, says Sean O’Grady but proposals could still leave businesses with a 5bn bill

- Sean O’Grady

While it has nowhere near the importance of next week’s Budget, the Employment Rights Bill will have a significant and potentially long-lasting effect on the economy. Attention has most recently focused on the idea that workers can now “go on strike for a year” as one of the more sensationalist headlines put it. In fact, some of the changes to industrial relations are much more modest than sometimes portrayed; but others, and allied changes to the minimum wage and employers’ national insurance obligations, may have a greater impact.

Will workers be going on strike for a year?

No – at least, no more than at the moment. The particular measure in question extends the length of the “mandate” to consider taking industrial action from six months to a year. Given that going on strike for any period involves loss of pay, and that few if any stoppages last six months, a strike dragging on for up to a year is vanishingly unlikely. This would also apply to a year working to rule and other arrangements short of a strike, but even in the 1970s when some workplaces did stand still for months on end (because strikers were given benefits) such disruption was uncommon.

Why the fuss?