The Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA2025) introduces a statutory right for independent trade unions to access workplaces for the purposes of meeting, supporting, representing, recruiting or organising workers and facilitating collective bargaining. The underlying policy objective is to support fair, modern and effective industrial relations by enabling unions to communicate directly with workers
The Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA 2025) introduces significant changes to trade union law. The government has recently published its proposals regarding the prohibition of detrimental treatment related to industrial action, and the introduction of electronic and workplace balloting for industrial action.
Protection Against Detriment for Taking Industrial Action
The ERA 2025 introduced Section 236A
The UK government has published a consultation on a draft statutory Code of Practice on trade unions’ right of access to workplaces. The draft Code of Practice was published on 8 April 2026, with the consultation closing on 20 May 2026. These proposals signal a fundamental shift in the landscape of trade union access —
Trade unions should shape working life in a meaningful way through collective agreements ensuring good working relations. In order to be eligible for collective bargaining, they must have a minimum bargaining unit vis-à-vis the workplace, says the German Federal Constitutional Court.
In Germany, the labour courts decide whether associations are eligible for collective bargaining and
The French authorities have been very prolific in the area of effecting reforms to employment law, and 2019 will not be an exception to this general rule (although perhaps less so than was the case in 2017 and 2018).
First, in 2019, a certain number of reforms promulgated in 2017 and 2018 will either come
An estimated 8 to 10% of Singapore’s existing workforce comprise freelancers and self-employed individuals.[1] This percentage is likely to increase with the expansion of the gig and on-demand economy. In recent months, there has been increasing public concern as to the ‘employment’ rights and legal status of these freelancers and self-employed individuals. Are they
In March 2016, we issued a legal update discussing Private Member’s Bill C-234. This Bill, tabled by the NDP, proposed the introduction in the Canada Labour Code of measures comparable to the anti-scab provisions contained in the Québec Labour Code.
This NDP proposition was undertaken to support longstanding unions’ demands – in the past,
On August 22, 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit joined the Seventh Circuit in finding that an employer violates the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) by requiring employees to sign an agreement including a class arbitration waiver.
In Morris v. Ernst & Young, plaintiffs were required to sign “concerted action
In the much anticipated Columbia University decision, the National Labor Relations Board reversed its most recent precedent and held that student teaching assistants at private colleges and universities are statutory employees under the National Labor Relations Act and may therefore vote to form a union. This decision is a return to an earlier decision by
There is a growing body of arbitral jurisprudence upholding summary dismissal of employees who breached workplace codes of conduct, confidentiality and privacy policies by deliberately snooping into co-worker or client records without any legitimate purpose and for reasons of their own. A number of these cases have concerned privacy breaches by hospital employees. Ontario Nurses’