The Employment Rights Act – introduced by Labour in 2025 – is in the process of coming into force, with new protections for workers being implemented in stages up until 2027.
The changes include limitations on zero-hour contracts, restrictions on fire and rehire practices and giving workers paternity leave rights on the first day of employment.
The legislation also unpicks some anti-union rules in the UK’s employment law framework. One of these is the introduction of online ballots for industrial action.
Presently, trade unions are required to hold postal ballots for industrial action, including for strikes. This can make balloting for industrial action slow, lengthy and reliant on the postal service effectively delivering ballots in a timely manner. As such, it significantly diminishes the ability of trade unions to take effective industrial action and exercise leverage over employers.
The introduction of online ballots – which will happen on August 25 – has long been a demand of the British trade union movement.
However, the Tory shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith isn’t happy about it. In a lengthy article for the Daily Mail, Griffith has called for Labour to scrap four parts of the Employment Rights Act – including online ballots for trade unions.
In the article, Griffith acknowledges that online ballots will “increase the power of the unions” and that it will make it “quicker and easier for unions to stage industrial action”. But instead of seeing this as a positive step towards ending Britain’s aggressively anti-union laws, Griffith unsurprisingly thinks rebalancing power in favour of workers is bad thing.
Griffith goes on to say that the real problem with online ballots though is that there is a risk of cyber attacks and that workers may feel intimidated by their colleagues into voting a certain way, arguing “I do not believe that an electronic system, with workers voting in staff rooms or on lunch breaks at their place of work, can ever be a truly secret ballot. In the worst-case scenario this could involve workers feeling obliged to share screenshots from their phones that reveal how they voted.”
Here, Griffith reveals his blatant hypocrisy. The majority of democratic organisations in the UK don’t hold postal ballots for their internal elections and decisions. It’s much cheaper, quicker and easier to hold ballots digitally.
Among those organisations that hold their ballots online are all major political parties. That includes – you guessed it – the Conservative Party of which Griffith is a member and frontbench spokesperson.
Why can Conservative Party members be trusted to participate in a free and fair ballot held online but trade union members can’t? Why are workers more likely to be intimidated by their colleagues than Conservative members would be by their peers? Why is the risk of a cyber attack too high for workers deciding whether to withdraw their Labour but not for Tory members determining a potential future prime minister?
A cynic might conclude that Griffith isn’t actually that concerned about the security of ballots, but more with restricting the ability of workers to collectively organise for better pay and conditions…
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
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