The charity Young Women’s Trust celebrates the announcement that the Employment Rights Bill has received Royal Assent and will now become law. The legislation that will come as part of this bill will grant new, and much needed, rights to workers across the country.
With young women being more likely than many other workers to be in low paid, insecure work and to experience unfair treatment in the workplace, the implementation of these laws can’t come soon enough.
To summarise what the Employment Rights Act will do:
- Make jobs more secure – by banning exploitative zero hours contracts
- Make work safer for women – demanding employers do more to prevent sexual harassment
- Strengthen enforcement of workplace rights by creating a new Fair Work Agency
- Improve flexible working and bring in new rights for parents, like paternity leave from day one in a job
- Give more workers sick pay – you’ll get it from day one of illness, no matter what you earn
- Improve pay and conditions for care workers and school support staff
- Break the silence about workplace harassment by banning NDAs
- Demand employers do more to tackle the gender pay gap – they will now have to produce action plans showing how they’ll tackle it
- Give trade unions more power and freedom to represent workers.
Claire Reindorp, chief executive of Young Women’s Trust, said: “Today signifies that we are on the cusp of seeing real action to tackle the toxic mix of sexism and poor employment practices. The laws that will come as part of the Employment Rights Act will make a significant difference to all workers, but particularly people on insecure contracts, navigating workplaces where unfair pay and poor treatment is rife – a world where young women are disproportionately represented. We now look forward to working with the Government to make sure that the transformation of our workplaces ignites real change in people’s lives.”
What’s important now is that the laws are properly enforced for them to make a difference in real life. At Young Women’s Trust we’re calling for more education for young women about their rights, stronger action on employers who don’t play by the rules, and protection for workers who speak up.