Labour promises to consult business on UK workers’ rights

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Labour has promised a “full and comprehensive” consultation with business and other groups on Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to improve UK worker rights in a new version of the opposition party’s “New Deal for Working People”.

The document, seen by the Financial Times and set to be publicly unveiled in the coming weeks, is an attempt by the party to put the policies “into a form that our candidates can campaign on”, Labour said this month.

The opposition party in 2021 pledged a list of policies, including a ban on zero hour contracts and a “right to switch off”, bundled in an “employment rights bill” it would introduce within 100 days of taking office.

The New Deal, spearheaded by deputy leader Angela Rayner, also included a vow to give workers full employment protections on “day one” of a new job. Those three pledges have been weakened since first proposed.

Labour will now commit to “starting the legislative process” within 100 days if it wins the next general election, saying it will “publish draft legislative proposals” in that timeframe.

The new text incorporates some changes to the reforms agreed last year at Labour’s national policy forum, a gathering of party officials, MPs and union leaders.

These include allowing companies to still use probationary periods for new staff and giving workers a right to a contract reflecting their recent regular work pattern, rather than an outright ban on zero hour contracts.

But it also goes further with repeated promises, including to business groups who had been increasingly vocal in opposition to the policies in recent months, that Labour would not press forward without consulting.

The text pledges a “full and comprehensive consultation on the implementation of the New Deal” with “businesses, trade unions and civil society” invited to participate. 

Labour has also leavened its promises with more business-friendly language, such as on its pledge to ban fire and rehire where the party says: “It is important that businesses can restructure to remain viable and preserve their workforce when there is genuinely no alternative.”

Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite the Union, which was Labour’s biggest single donor during the past decade, said the document represented “a row back on a row back”. 

“It is totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions,” she said on Wednesday. “Workers will see through this and mark the retreat after retreat as a betrayal.”

Labour insisted there had only been minimal changes to the New Deal since last summer’s national policy forum.

A Labour party spokesperson said: “A Labour government will need to hit the ground running and that is why we have been strengthening the proposals to implement our commitments. If elected we will bring forward legislation within 100 days of entering government.”

Another union figure expressed disappointment that the New Deal no longer includes a pledge to use public procurement to “support good work” by directing contracts to companies that recognise trade unions, having high environmental standards and being “fully tax compliant”.

Labour said the procurement pledge remained party policy but declined to say if the promise would be in its manifesto this year.

A Labour promise to give workers the “right to switch off”, so that employers cannot contact them outside working hours, has also been changed in the document.

The text now promises a more ad hoc approach, based on models in Ireland and Belgium, giving “workers and employers the opportunity to have constructive conversations and work together on bespoke workplace policies or contractual terms that benefit both parties”.

Right to switch off policies in other countries have not always been as effective as hoped — except in prompting managers to add lines to their emails saying that replies are not required out of hours.

Some other Labour promises from three years ago are still being pursued in full, including a pledge to reverse three pieces of anti-strike legislation introduced by the Conservative government.