The Employment Rights Act is a significant step forward in improving the right of workers to have their trade union recognised by their employer. It not only creates new opportunities to collectively defend pay and conditions, but tackles some of the tactics used by unscrupulous employers to union bust workers’ attempts to build a union in their workplace.
This is vital at a time when many people’s working lives are becoming increasingly precarious. The campaign by Amazon Coventry workers, supported by the GMB Union, provided an important test case that informed this legislation. In 2024, the union narrowly lost a ballot of the workforce that would have forced Amazon to recognise the union. That application for recognition revealed fundamental problems with the legislation that we were able to document. This document, informed by the voices of Amazon workers, helped persuade politicians of the changes that were needed.
The GMB Union first applied for statutory recognition at Amazon’s BHX4 Coventry warehouse in 2023. At that time, the union believed that more than 50 per cent of workers in the warehouse were GMB members, meeting the key test for statutory recognition. Amazon then recruited more than 1,300 additional workers, diluting the union membership below the required 50 per cent, before a count was taken by the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which oversees applications for statutory recognition. Employers will no longer be able to do this, because the Employment Rights Act mandates that anybody employed after the date of the application for recognition must not be included in the count of the workforce.
The ballot for recognition in 2024 gave the union rights to access the workplace in order to speak to workers, but Amazon was able to drag out the process for agreeing the terms of that access for 142 days, during which time it ran a relentless campaign to persuade workers to vote against recognition, drafting in 30 managers from other warehouses to help persuade workers, and spreading rumours that recognition could lead the warehouse to close, or could delay a pay rise by years. These threats carried very serious consequences because many of the workers were migrants with family members relying on the money they sent back home. Amazon also provided workers with a QR code that opened a worker’s personal email with a prepopulated message to the union resigning their membership. These and other measures were the subject of a complaint to the CAC, but the complaint was ruled inadmissible because it was made more than 48 hours after the ballot closed. All of this has now changed, with a set timescale for the terms of access to be agreed, new powers for the CAC to enforce the terms of access, and an extended deadline for complaints about employer conduct. All of these sensible measures create a more level playing field.
At the time of the 2024 application for recognition, there was a confusing collection of goalposts that a union was expected to meet. To apply for recognition, the union had to demonstrate both that at least 10 per cent of workers in the bargaining unit were members of the union, and that at least 50 per cent were likely to support recognition. And to win the ballot for recognition required both a majority vote and at least 40 per cent of workers in the bargaining unit voting for recognition. This has now been simplified to 10 per cent of workers needing to be in the union to apply for recognition, and recognition to be decided by a simple majority vote.
In 2024, voting could only take place by a postal or workplace ballot. Many Amazon workers were living in houses of multiple occupation, which made the prospect of even receiving a letter challenging. This was exacerbated by many workers not being familiar with the UK postal system. Leading workers within the GMB branch therefore opted for a workplace ballot, but this carried its own challenges, with the risk that some workers may have felt intimidated in an environment drenched in Amazon propaganda urging workers to vote against recognition. These problems are now being addressed through proposals to allow secure electronic balloting.
It’s unlikely that many of these legislative changes would have happened without the determined struggle of the Amazon Coventry workers, as their stories were frequently referred to by politicians to demonstrate the human cost of the previous rules. The majority of Amazon Coventry workers were from migrant or refugee backgrounds, coming from all over the world and speaking many languages, but they united in a struggle that, through the Employment Rights Act has benefitted all workers in the UK. They have demonstrated that working people can play a powerful role in driving positive changes to the law. Now it will be up to workers across the UK to decide what they will do with these increased rights, and whether they will use them to build their own powerful trade unions in every workplace.
Stuart Richards is Regional Secretary for TUC Midlands.
Tom Vickers is an Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University.
Image credit: Olivier Rouge via Unsplash
