The 2025 Employment Rights Act (ERA) brings in many new and positive rules for workers and trade unions. These are being phased in. At the end of October the right for unions to contact workers to explain what trade unions are and to recruit new members is being brought in. Unions will need to make applications to request access to a workplace. Our branch passed this motion at the August meeting calling on our union to make the most of this opportunity to build our movement.
We encourage other union branches to consider how they could use this new right to take initiatives for example to reach workers that have previously been difficult to contact (shift workers, remote workers, etc), or where we have a base in one part of company but find it difficult to expand.
Many new trade union rights are furnished by the Employment Rights Act 2025. Amongst these being, for the first time, the right to union access, introducing a statutory right for trade unions to access workplaces to recruit, organise, and represent members.
With well over 46,000 employers in the UK with over 20 employees which will include many times this number of workplaces (potential collective bargaining units), both the opportunity and the logistical challenge exist.
Whilst our existing methods will be enhanced by the guarantee of access and a less onerous statutory recognition process, these alone will not take advantage of what could be a window of opportunity to drive up membership, collective bargaining, trade union activity and union power. If the current government, which has implemented these rights proves to be only a one term prospect. These rights may only be transitory, with their repeal being followed by further anti-union fetters.
The time is right as a movement to grasp the opportunity to grow.
Therefore, we call upon Unite, at Regional and National level to allocate the financial and organisational resources necessary to map, organise and achieve recognition in workplaces across the board. To establish lay member campaign groups for this purpose on Geographical and Sectoral [groups of related industries] lines as deemed appropriate.
If this is to bear fruit, the support must reflect the opportunity, there is the potential to increase our membership and organisation by tens of thousands:
Examples, but not limited to these could include:
- Officer [union employees] target lists being turned into active campaigns.
- Activists [lay members] being engaged to help map, plan, organise and convince workers to join the union.
- Drawing on the experience of our Retired and Community members by accrediting them as necessary and deploying them into workplaces to talk about trade unions and to support industrial branches with their campaigning.
- Organisers [employees of Unite’s organising department] being deployed in a role that germinates activists into genuinely self reliant bargaining units and then move on to the next workplace.
- A true sense of union activism being fostered which sees the propagation of union density and workplace organisation as part of their role, not simply limited to insular collective bargaining, but part of a wider movement.
- The cross pollination of campaigns with sister trade unions and the inculcation of genuinely reciprocal and respectful attitudes towards demarcation and joint union agreements.