IT IS ONE hesitant step forward but a long way from what working people need and want.

The new Employment Rights Bill would ban zero-hours contracts, outlaw the “fire-and-rehire” tactics we saw with the Dover ferry dispute and extend existing employment rights to the first day of employment. It would ease trade union access to workplaces, junk the Tories’ Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act and the 2016 Trade Union Act. It takes a tentative step towards sectoral bargaining by proposing a vestigial version for the social care and teacher support sectors.

Each of these provisions touches on the problems workers face and a new poll shows an extension of workers’ rights is vastly popular including among Reform UK and Tory voters but the Bill as a whole fails to make quite the impact it could.

A key problem is that in Britain’s rather unregulated labour market many workers miss out on the protections “employees” can access because they are not deemed to be employees as such. This question was flagged up early on in the consultation process but now is kicked into the long grass and could easily be lost during the proposed “full and detailed consultation process.”

Labour’s original offer to the trade unions was a promise to “ensure that UK law complies in every respect with the international obligations ratified by the UK.” In fact Britain — since the Thatcherite assault on union and employment rights in the last century — is forever in trouble with the International Labour Organisation and in four decades Labour has failed, when in government, to fully repeal the whole edifice of anti-union legislation.

Piecemeal reform, perpetually falling short of what workers need, is the persistent problem when Labour in government acts differently from the way it speaks in opposition.

Better access and information obligations imposed on employers is a step forward in principle but if an employer ignores a decision by the Central Arbitration Committee, the only penalty it faces is a fine paid to the government with no remedy for the union and no mechanism for a union to recover its legal costs.

The single most effective structural change that would strengthen the negotiating position of workers and their trade unions would be the introduction of sectoral bargaining across the whole of the employment scene.

In proposing a rather limited scheme for the notoriously exploitative social care sector the government has accepted the principle but appears scared to either implement it fully and effectively or to contemplate it in other sectors where trade union strength would help level the playing field.

An enforceable system of sectoral bargaining in a capitalist economy entails a recognition by the state that the interests of employers and workers are not identical and that it is generally beneficial that labour standards, pay levels and employment rights are uniform across each sector.

Labour in government tends to go more than halfway to meet employers’ demands and, in practice, leave much of the Thatcherite structure unreformed.

Predictably the CBI and the Federation of Small Businesses claim that any extension of rights for workers will cost jobs. Actually uniform employment conditions underpins stability in the labour market but, as a class, these people prefer the opportunity to ramp up profits at the expense of workers’ wages.

Some people are rather upbeat about the new Bill. If their expectations are fulfilled it will be a triumph of hope over experience. In the meantime the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom together with the Institute of Employment Rights, supported by the Morning Star, will rally for a strengthening of the Bill on Saturday March 22.