The business secretary has condemned scaremongering around Labour’s plans for an overhaul of workers’ rights next month, saying the package will transform lives, including for pregnant women and bereaved parents. In an interview with the Guardian, Jonathan Reynolds said Labour would legislate next month for far stronger protection for pregnant employees, and begin consultation on plans for a more generous and modernised system for parental leave. He also confirmed that the legislation would mean a maximum probation period of about six months at the vast majority of businesses, with workers given protection from unfair dismissal and rights to maternity and sick pay. After months of detailed negotiations with businesses and trade unions over the Make Work Pay plans, which will form next month’s employment bill, Reynolds said there had “absolutely” been scaremongering over the plans and that headlines on French-style labour laws had been “pretty obviously wrong”. “This is really popular stuff,” Reynolds said. “When you look at the flexible working stuff again, it couldn’t really be more reasonable, what we’re saying. I don’t think it’s onerous what we’re putting forward, but I do think it will make a difference to people’s lives.” The employment bill, which was branded as the “New Deal for Working People” when Labour was in opposition, will be the key counter to the difficult budget that Rachel Reeves will deliver at the end of October, along with a planning overhaul. It is key to the narrative that Keir Starmer will drive through on Tuesday at the Labour conference, that the government will deliver swift, tangible change and improvement, as well as economic stability.
The bill has been the subject of an onslaught of lobbying by business groups who have warned that the extension of employment rights and strengthening trade unions would place unnecessary burdens on their members and hamper growth. Reynolds said now was the time for the government to begin to loudly champion what it would do for ordinary people. “I am really keen to argue for this bill. I think you do your best work when you’re happy at home. I do think making sure work reflects the realities of many of our lives today is really important,” he said. “The populism we see around Europe and the US … this is a challenging environment, you’ve got to be able to show that politics can deliver and make a difference to people’s lives. I think that’s really, really important, and this is an example. It is something that will give a tangible, meaningful improvement to people’s lives.” Reynolds said he was particularly passionate about the family-friendly reforms that the bill would bring, including an overhaul of the parental leave system. The review will look at shared parental leave and the current right to take 18 weeks of unpaid parental leave for each child any time before their 18th birthday, which is currently only available to employees with one year of continuous employment. “We’re going to review the whole parental leave system. We’re going to have much stronger protections for pregnant workers,” Reynolds said. “I think we lose a lot of talent from the labour market. The majority of trainees at top law firms were female, majority of associates were female, majority of partners were male. Obviously bad for the individual, for the worker, but isn’t that bad for the economy, isn’t that bad for business? “So you’ll see specifically in this bill the specific pregnancy protections for women who are in the workplace and on parental leave, because that’s the thing that will have to go out to a longer-term consultation about what those changes should look like.”
The bill would also give bereaved parents whose partner has died in childbirth but whose baby survives the right to leave for the first time, which was previously not enshrined in law. Labour had pledged to present the bill to parliament within its first 100 days in office, and is expected to do so in early October. The final sticking point with businesses and trade unions had been the maximum period the bill would enforce for probation periods, which Reynolds said would land at about six months for the majority of businesses. “All business wants to know that their normal recruiting practices will be reflected but I think if you had worked for two years and you were unfairly dismissed without redress, without recourse, that’s quite significant.” Reynolds, who has defended Starmer and Reeves over the course of the Labour conference for attendance at events such as football matches and concerts gifted by donors, hinted that he believed there was a false equivalence in much of the criticism. “When you’re a politician it’s not really about what’s fair and what’s not, it’s just how it is, but there is a fundamental difference whether people think Keir should go and still watch Arsenal to the kind of Covid corruption under the last government,” he said. “You turn down the vast majority of it. The test can’t be ‘don’t go to something if you’d actually like it’. I have no objections to the transparency of it but the idea that somehow British politics is sort of being subjected to malign influence, I don’t think that is true.”