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?
This story is from the October 25, 2024 edition of The Independent.
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This story is from the October 25, 2024 edition of The Independent.
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