Good enforcement needs many ingredients. Workers need to know their rights, and they need the means to defend them. Employers need to understand their duties and have the capacity to comply. In reality, the world is much messier. Many workers do not know what they are entitled to or lack the time and power to challenge bad practice, and many employers take advantage – an arguably rational response. A MISSING ELEMENT Which brings me to the forgotten art of negotiating. One major missing lever in shaping UK working lives is negotiation itself. By this, I mean employers and workforces – at company or sector level – making proposals to one another and negotiating change. On wages. On working time. On parental leave. On flexibility. On the organisation of work. Negotiation has a simple but powerful advantage: it forces both sides to engage with each other’s constraints and priorities. Contrast that with the current model, where government “listens” to employers and workers separately and then attempts to design laws and schemes that placate both. It rarely satisfies either. None of this is an argument against minimum standards. The Employment Rights Act is an overdue example of why they are important. Nor is it an argument against encouraging best practice. But we have allowed negotiation – a core mechanism for shaping labour markets as old as work itself – to wither. Reviving it would allow government to step back from micromanaging employment relationships, and refocus on its core responsibilities: public services, housing, and enforcement. It would allow employers and workers to shape outcomes that work in practice, not just on paper. It would be dynamic, rather than limited to punctuation points that occur once the balance has tipped too far one way. This is intentionally a simplified framing, but the mechanisms matter. WHAT WE NEED So, how do we negotiate today, when only one in five workers is in a trade union? Two things are needed. Employers must be better organised and prepared to come to the table – often at sector level. And workers need a collective voice. Growing union membership is the longterm, bottom-up route. The repeal of anti-union legislation will aid this, but it is slow going. There is, however, a shortcut that has made its way tentatively onto the political agenda in recent years: sectoral collective bargaining. The government’s plans to set up Social Care Negotiating Bodies and Fair Pay Agreements by 2027 point in this direction, supporting workforces with low union density and high levels of insecurity to have a say over pay and conditions. As ever, the details are key. The bodies and their powers are still being designed. The real test will be whether workers genuinely get to shape outcomes alongside their employers, or whether the state hovers like an anxious parent, reluctant to let go. We need to get better at this. Otherwise, I fear we will be here again in a decade, tinkering with employment law whilst major technological, environmental, and societal changes race ahead. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 21 Alice Martin is Head of Research at the Work Foundation at Lancaster University. alice.martin@lancaster.ac.uk
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