Workers’ rights have been eroded, but reviving them won’t be bad for business

Last week, in the latest implementation of measures from the 2025 Employment Rights Act, trade unions were granted the right to organise in any workplace with more than 21 employees. “I don’t want to sound churlish,” wrote the Financial Times columnist Camilla Cavendish, a former director of policy for David Cameron, “but won’t that raise the cost of doing business ?” I don’t want to sound churlish either, but is that not the usual response from “supporters of business” to any improvements in workers’ rights or conditions?

By Cavendish’s own account, everything from raising the minimum wage to easing some restrictions on strike action is misguided. She even worries that “Employers will not be allowed to monitor what is said” in union meetings. Lord forbid that workers be able to meet without being spied on by their bosses! The irony in yelps about “a union storm coming for employers” is that workers’ rights today are weaker than they have been for most of the past century.

From the early 1980s, successive governments have aggressively pushed back on the ability of workers to take collective action. The Labour party largely accepted the Tory deprecation of employment rights. In 1997, barely a month before New Labour’s landslide victory, Tony Blair wrote in the Times that “the essential elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will remain” and that his government would ensure that British law would be “ the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world ”.

After their 2015 election victory, Conservatives introduced yet more legislation to make the most restrictive laws even more so. Under pressure from employers, many proposed changes, such as the banning of “fire and rehire” and the abolition of zero-hours contracts, were watered down Under pressure from employers, many proposed changes, such as the banning of “fire and rehire” and the abolition of zero-hours contracts, were watered down The 2025 Employment Rights Act, based on Labour’s New Deal for Working People , aimed to reverse some of these restrictions.

But, under pressure from employers, many proposed changes, such as the banning of “fire and rehire”, protection against unfair dismissal, the abolition of zero-hours contracts, and the creation of a single status for all workers , were watered down. In his new book, An Injury to All , the historian Ewan Gibbs unravels the story of what he calls the “‘de-organisation’ of workplaces” – the “diminishing importance of unionised workers in the British economy”.

Such de-organisation, Gibbs argues, was the consequence not simply of deindustrialisation and globalisation but also of “class struggle from above… waged by employers, with important support from Conservative and Labour politicians”. The story of the Thatcher government’s assault on the unions, most notably the miners, is well known. But, as Gibbs shows, the process of de-organisation began earlier. Central to his account is the Grunwick strike, which began 50 years ago.

Grunwick was a photo-processing plant in north-west London, where in August 1976, 137 mainly Asian women went on strike in protest at appalling conditions, racist intimidation and the banning of unions. Within weeks the women received support from other workers – miners, electricians, builders, bus drivers – who organised mass pickets, while postal workers refused to move the company’s orders. The strike lasted for almost two years before the TUC withdrew its support, an act of betrayal that led to defeat.

Nevertheless, for many on the left the Grunwick dispute was a touchstone, revealing the possibilities of working-class solidarity and, at a time when racism was woven into the fabric of Britain in a way almost unimaginable today, of the possibilities of building coalitions across racial divides. Gibbs, while acknowledging these elements, points to Grunwick as emblematic in a different way, too. The strike, and its defeat, prefigured what was to come, foreseeing “Britain’s future of increasingly precarious and non-union employment”.

Related articles: Jonathan Pie, the accidental satirist Axe hangs over high street giant Poundland after US owners look to administration “The mail-order room at Grunwick,” Gibbs observes, “anticipated the contemporary Amazon ‘fulfilment’ centre in its form of labour process, intensity and cost minimisation”, a place of “low wages and ‘flexible’ conditions”. The violent policing of picket lines, with 550 arrests the most at that time in any industrial dispute since the 1926 General Strike, and a concerted political effort to undermine the legitimacy of the dispute by associating solidarity with criminality, also pointed to coming developments.

The failure of mass pickets to close the plant or to gain union recognition exposed the limits of traditional trade unionism, especially in organising poorer marginalised workers. At the same time, the “political forces committed to the de-organisation of the labour movement were emboldened by Grunwick”, which encouraged the all-out assault on unions that came in the 1980s. The “Grunwickisation” of industrial relations has helped create a “flexible” labour market, a euphemism for the expansion of insecure, poorly paid jobs.

“Insecurity,” as a 2022 study observed , has “become an endemic part of British working life” and “the proportion of the workforce employed precariously has ballooned”. The kind of insecurity once associated solely with the gig economy has spread through many sectors of employment, from hospitality and social care to “previously protected middle-class jobs in academia”. Meanwhile union membership has halved from 13.2 million in 1979 to 6.6 million last year .

In 1979, 29.5m days were lost in strike action; last year the figure stood at 740,000 – a fall of 97%. This is the reality behind all the warnings of a “return to the 1970s”. The unstated assumption in much of the discussion is that the rights and conditions of workers need to be sacrificed in the name of being “business friendly”. So successful has been the “class war from above” that many accept this almost as common sense. That is what needs to be challenged, not the still pitifully weak rights that workers now possess.

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