About the book

The Employment Rights Bill 2024 sets out a series of necessary and overdue reforms to labour rights in the UK. However, these reforms represent a set of narrow interventions into a wider legal landscape that is heavily tilted in favour of the rights of shareholders over those of workers. This structural imbalance between workers and corporate shareholders manifests itself as a systematic undercutting of the effectiveness of workers’ rights against their employers.

In the context of global economic insecurity, climate change and industrial restructuring, the need to enhance the economic security and resilience of employees, firms, and communities has never been greater. Yet the current corporate law framework undermines this, enabling shareholder value extraction, creating conditions of endemic precarity for workers, and eroding worker voice. Thus, while the Employment Rights Bill represents an important step forward for workers, deeper change is necessary if the rights it provides are to be made truly effective against employers.

This pamphlet illustrates this structural imbalance between workers’ and shareholders’ rights and demonstrates the legal mechanisms by which shareholding serves to both subordinate workers’ interests and expose them to conditions of endemic precarity. In doing so, it shows the significance of the absence of these structural concerns in the Employment Rights Bill, and demonstrates why the trade-union movement can no longer afford to ignore corporate law as a site for labour activism.

Preview

Click the image below to download a limited preview of the book.