Sack us please, we're British

Last year the government announced that it was going to be overhauling employment law as part of its austerity programme.1

A key plank of the changes is the extension of the time employees have without unfair dismissal protection from one year to two years. From April 6, 2012, employees sacked within the first two years with an employer will not be able to claim unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal (ET) except in cases of "automatically unfair" firings (due to someon a e's ethnicity, gender, trade union activities, or other protected characteristic).2 But of course proving sackings for automatically unfair reasons can be impossible in many cases.

In a barefaced bit of Orwellian doublespeak, Liberal Democrat business secretary Vince Cable stated that he was bringing in this change, making it easier for employers to sack people, in order to help create jobs!

This will have the effect of effectively casualising an even larger proportion of the workforce nominally on "permanent" contracts. Doing some quick calculations, I estimate that in time it will effectively mean that around a quarter of workers at any one time will have no job security.3

Apart from the fact that workers will feel more insecure, employers will be able to exploit this additional insecurity by bullying workers into working longer and harder without extra pay, and it will discourage more workers from standing up for themselves.

Even now, ETs are heavily biased towards employers. Contrary to many people's perceptions fuelled by occasional headlines about big payouts and "compensation culture", tribunals offer only minimum protection to workers in the vast majority of instances. Only 9% of unfair dismissal claims are successful, and the average payout is around £5,000 - which hardly compares to the lost wages even of a low-wage job. On top of this, millions of casual workers such as agency staff, have no rights against unfair dismissal at all.

Where the law cannot protect people's jobs, it leaves workers' solidarity as the only force which can. At my work, the only person management tried to sack in her first year who kept her job was one who had a near unanimous vote in favour of strike action in her support.

Further planned changes include the introduction of sizeable charges for filing ET claims , which will have the effect of discouraging many workers from exercising their rights at work, because they simply may not be able to afford to. Especially in cases such as the very common examples of wage theft in areas such as food service, the unpaid wages may amount to less than the cost of filing a claim. (This change could have an outcome, unintended from the government's point of view, in that it could lead to a rise in union membership if unions offer to pay the cost of members' tribunal claims.) Cable also states the government is considering removing unfair dismissal protection entirely from staff in businesses with fewer than 10 employees.

I thought it would be interesting to compare how the workers' movement in the UK has reacted to these changes, compared to when similar (but not nearly as bad) changes were proposed in France in 2006.

In 2006 the French government proposed introducing a new law, the CPE, which would allow employers to sack workers aged under 26 for any reason within the first two years. This is clearly far less-reaching than the new UK law. However, despite this, the country exploded.

Universities and high schools were occupied, mass demonstrations and street battles erupted across the country as millions took to the streets. When workers' strikes started, the government backed down, dropped the CPE and only passed a much-reduced version, the CNE which only applied to enterprises of fewer than 25 employees.4

By comparison, what has happened here since these changes were proposed? A couple of union leaders gave token soundbites against them in the press, and that's it.

Not only has there not been any sort of spontaneous response from the working class, but there has not been a peep from our official representatives in the trade unions.

Of course, given the UK's restrictive anti-strike laws it would be illegal to take industrial action over the changes - as it would be a "political" strike. However there has not been any kind of effort from unions to campaign or even inform their own members about this devastating change which will effectively destroy job security for a huge number of their members and potential members (not to mention all those not in a union at all).

From my union, Unison, despite being on all the reps/activist mailing lists all I have received about it is one mention in an updated legal briefing sent to senior reps - and nothing at all to lay members.

Saying this, I don't expect unions to have actually done anything about this, but I think it's a good representative example of how unions are not actually interested in representing or defending their own members, let alone the working class as a whole. They only act, usually in token ways, when they are forced to by pressure from below, when workers threaten to take some sort of action bypassing them.

Unlike proletarians in France, we haven't done that, and unless we start we can expect to continue to be shafted by employers and the government indefinitely.

• 1 The proposed changes and their timetables are listed here: http://www.personneltoday.com/events/list.aspx?navigationid=10&type=10026&past=false
• 2 The change will apply for workers who start new jobs after 6 April.
• 3 Assuming an even distribution of length of employment, 26% of private and 19.8% of public sector workers had been with employers for less than two years based on 2009 figures, equating to 24.7% of the workforce as a whole. Figures from http://www.guardianpublic.co.uk/workplace-reform-leadership and http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/16/public-sector-employment-statistics-map-by-authority
• 4 There is a short account of this movement, which was comprehensively covered on libcom.org, here: http://libcom.org/blog/short-history-cpe-protests-france