UK unions could seek bargaining rights with just 2% of workers as members  

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Unions in Britain could win the right to bargain with employers over pay and conditions when as few as 2 per cent of the workers are members, under new proposals that also make it easier to strike.

Currently, unions can seek formal recognition from an employer once 10 per cent of workers concerned have joined. But ministers will consult in the future on lowering this threshold to as little as 2 per cent, the government has said. 

Combined with a separate provision scrapping a 40 per cent turnout requirement for statutory recognition ballots, this change could make it much easier for unions to gain formal rights to bargain with employers over pay and conditions in workplaces where they are currently shut out. 

The pledge to consult in the future over the measure came in a separate consultation paper published this week by the Labour government, outlining wide-ranging changes to simplify union bids and make it easier for unions to recruit, organise and represent workers.

Other measures set out in the consultation would make it simpler for unions to ballot their members on strike action and to organise walkouts.

The proposals cut the notice unions must give employers of a strike from 14 days to seven. They would also allow unions to rerun ballots only after a year, rather than after six months at present.

Some of the planned changes, including the repeal of anti-strike laws passed by the previous Conservative administration, are already spelt out in the government’s employment rights bill. These will lower the thresholds for strike ballots to pass, making it easier to take industrial action.

“Whilst most employers do good by their workers, when this doesn’t happen, workers must have the ability to act collectively,” Angela Rayner and Jonathan Reynolds, the deputy prime minister and business secretary, wrote in the consultation.

Many of the detailed proposals set out in this week’s consultation are designed to prevent a repeat of the union-busting tactics Amazon deployed to fight off a recognition bid by the GMB union at its Coventry warehouse earlier this year.

They include provisions to prevent employers going on a hiring spree purely in order to dilute union membership and thwart a recognition bid.

Amanda Gearing, a GMB senior organiser, said the proposed changes “would go a long way to giving working people a fair chance of winning a shared union voice in their workplace”.

But Kevin Hollinrake, shadow business secretary, said the changes “present huge new powers to the trade unions, which by the government’s own impact assessment will risk unleashing waves of strikes, raising public sector pay settlements and mean higher taxes on business and working people”. 

He urged the Labour government to “stand up to their trade union paymasters and revise their growth killing bill, at the very least exempting small and medium sized companies from these catastrophic measures”.

The employment rights bill, as currently drafted, gives ministers the power to set the new membership threshold for union recognition ballots anywhere between 2 and 10 per cent through regulation.

The Trades Union Congress has made it clear it will press for the new threshold to be set at 2 per cent, arguing that the changes are “crucial if unions are to organise in new parts of the economy where employers resist their workers gaining a collective voice”.

After decades of decline, trade union membership in the UK has stabilised in recent years at about 22 per cent of employees — but it is heavily concentrated in the public sector and in sectors such as manufacturing, that have been shrinking as a share of overall employment.

The GMB’s defeat at Amazon — where its recognition ballot failed by a narrow margin, with 49.5 per cent of the workforce voting in favour of union representation — was a blow to the union movement, which has been struggling for years to gain a foothold at the tech giant and to build a presence in low paying, casualised parts of the service sector.  

David Hopper, a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin, said the reforms would “undoubtedly make it easier for unions to secure statutory recognition, including in workforces that are largely apathetic”.

But he added that the proposed new rights would not necessarily increase unions’ leverage, unless they also attracted enough members to give their demands force.

The bill also contains provisions that would give workers more protection against reprisals from their employer when they take strike action.

Michael Ford, a barrister and law professor, described this as a “significant” change, as it was not unusual for employers to threaten striking workers with the loss of benefits, or even to fire them if strikes dragged on beyond a 12 week period in which they were protected against dismissal.