The IER Podcast

From the 30th October 2026, employers in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland) will be required to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, including harassment by third parties.

These changes mark a further development in the implementation of the Employment Rights Act 2025, but do they go far enough to remedy gaps in protection from harassment in and outside of the workplace?

In this episode, we chat to Dr Natalie Sedacca, Assistant Professor in Employment Law at Durham Law School, who shares her analysis of these provisions as well as the new whistleblowing protection and restrictions on Non-Disclosure Agreements.

We take a look at the UK’s obligations since ratifying ILO Convention 190 and what the road to improving mechanisms to address harassment at work has looked like.

The episode also considers the meaning of taking ‘all reasonable steps’, and where responsibility for the proactive enforcement for harassment lies.

Do share your thoughts on the episode on social media, and subscribe to the IER’s Working Life Podcast.

Our factsheet on Harassment can be found here: https://www.ier.org.uk/employment-rights-bill-ier-fact-sheets/

You can read Dr Sedacca’s article for the Industrial Law Journal here: https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwag008

A flagship policy of the Starmer Government’s upgrade to workers’ rights was the promise to end the exploitative use of zero-hours contracts. Though these types of casual labour arrangements now referred to as ‘zero-hours contracts’ have been around for a long time, the past decade has seen the labour movement call out employers for abusing the one-sided flexibility of these arrangements, plunging millions into insecurity and low wages.

In present day, ONS data (2025) shows near record levels of zero hours contracts: 1.7 million people in the UK are currently subjected to these arrangements, which is the second-highest figure ever recorded, and nearly three in four of them are in what’s classed as severely insecure work.

Labour’s New Deal for Working People had promised to ban these contracts altogether, but four years later this materialised in the ERA 2025 as a guaranteed hours framework that preserves the legal status of zero hours contracts.

In this episode, Director of the Institute of Employment Rights, James Harrison is in conversation with Dr Zoe Adams, labour law scholar and Affiliated Lecturer in Law at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She is also the author of ‘The Legal Concept of Work’ (2022), and ‘Labour and the Wage’ (2020).

In this episode, Dr Adams explains the mechanism behind the ERA 2025 approach to restricting the use of zero-hours contracts, and evaluates whether these provisions go far enough to bring their use to an end. James and Zoe also talk about the dangers ahead with loopholes left open during the consultation period, and worries surrounding the enforcement of the guaranteed hours offer. They also consider the ways in which unscrupulous employers will still be able to get around this legislation if the Government doesn’t commit to strengthening it and addressing the causes of over-reliance on casual labour arrangements. 

Take a look at the Institute’s factsheet on ZHCs, authored by Dr Adams: https://www.ier.org.uk/employment-rights-bill-ier-fact-sheets/

This IER podcast and views expressed by experts does not necessarily reflect the collective view of the Institute. The responsibility of the Institute is limited to approving its media, publications, briefings and responses as worthy of consideration.

For over a decade, Spain's food delivery giants built their business on a the premise that riders were 'collaborators', self-employed and outside the reach of labour law, and responsible for their own risk. That era could now be over for food delivery service riders in Spain. On 15th January 2026, Uber Eats Spain announced it would abandon its hybrid model of employed and self-employed riders in favour of an employees-only structure, following Glovo Spain which made the same move in July 2025. Between them, Spain's two largest platforms have now shifted their entire rider workforce onto contracts of employment, bringing riders fully within the protection of Spanish labour law.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr Antonio Garcia Munoz (lecturer in Labour Law at the University of Glasgow) who is interviewed by Donya Jeyabalasingham (IER) on this case study, exploring what drove this dramatic reversal, what it means for riders' working rights, pay, and job security, and what lessons it holds for gig economy regulation elsewhere.

For further information, you can read Antonio's blog on this issue here: https://www.ier.org.uk/comments/the-end-of-the-gig-economy-the-case-of-spanish-riders/

In accordance with the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA), a new Fair Work Agency (FWA) was launched on the 7 April 2026.

The initial 'New Deal for Workers' (2021) said that 'Rights and protections are only worth the paper they are written on if they are enforced'. In this episode of the Working Life Podcast, we take a look at the hurdles this new agency is likely to face in its ambition towards achieving a significant improvement in compliance levels in the field of employment law.

We are especially pleased to have Professor David Whyte (Professor of Climate Justice at the QMUL School of Law and author of 'Ecocide: kill the corporation before it kills us') on. David is one of the foremost academic experts on the relationship between law and corporate power, with a unique level of expertise on issues ranging from working conditions, institutional fraud and corruption, human rights violations, and the institutions around the enforcement of labor rights, in which he is a great expert.

David has also co-authored (with Professor Ruth Dukes (Glasgow) the IER Briefing on the Fair Work Agency, which we recommend taking a look at once you've given the episode a listen. You can access it by following this link: https://www.ier.org.uk/publications/briefing-the-governments-fair-work-agency-risks-becoming-a-toothless-watchdog/

In this episode, Professor Nicola Countouris (UCL and IER) talks to David about the FWA, what its strategic priorities are, the consequences of public sector funding cuts, and what the agency will need in order to be effective and credible.

Neil Todd, leading trade union law expert and Partner at Thompsons Solicitors and Carolyn Jones, Senior Vice President of the Institute of Employment Rights (IER), join us for the third episode of Working Life.

In this episode, we revisit the detrimental practice of fire and rehire and examine where the Employment Rights Act 2025 ultimately landed after the government's initial pledge to ban the practice outright.

We explore where the Act strengthens protections for workers facing attempts to erode their terms and conditions through dismissal and re-engagement, and whether it goes far enough to prevent employers from exploiting potential loopholes. Neil unpacks the new provisions, explaining which contractual changes are covered, the circumstances in which employers may still rely on statutory exceptions, and whether tribunal remedies will provide a sufficient deterrent against unlawful practices.

Drawing on lessons from the P&O Ferries dismissals in 2022, we ask whether the new framework will genuinely end the misuse of fire and rehire, or simply reshape the calculations some employers may make when considering it.

Chapters:

00:00:06 Introduction

00:01:48 Changes made by the Employment Rights Act 2025

00:04:08 Does the Act address the P&O scenario?

00:06:07 How the Act’s initial provisions were weakened

00:07:47 The Government’s consultation process on fire and rehire and restricted variations

00:11:23 The ‘financial difficulties’ exemption

00:15:01 Remedies and interim relief

In the latest episode of ‘Working Life’, IER Chairperson Lord John Hendy KC discusses the right to strike in the UK with Professor Tonia Novitz, a leading academic in labour law at the University of Bristol Centre for Law at Work. She sits on the advisory board of the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) and is co-editor of ‘The Right to Strike Reimagined’ (Bloomsbury 2026,) as well as co-author of ‘The Right to Strike in International Law’ (Bloomsbury 2021). 

In this second instalment of the Working Life Podcast, Lord Hendy KC and Professor Novitz begin with a historical discussion of the first recorded instances of strike action in Ancient Egypt, and what we mean today by calling for an enshrined positive ‘Right to Strike’. The Employment Rights Act 2025 took the necessary step of repealing contemporary anti-union legislation such as the majority of the Trade Union Act (2016) and the MSL (Strikes) Act 2023, and our speakers discuss how far this will go to address the restrictions that have been placed on workers’ ability to strike over the past 40 years. 

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to the Right to Strike and its History

07:37 What is meant by exercising the ‘Right to Strike’

13:06 Contemporary attempts at restricting the power to take industrial action

14:40 The Employment Rights Act 2025 and the right to strike omission

18:30 The P&O Ferry dispute 

21:17 New changes to balloting, picketing law and strike mandates

25:40 The extension of protection from dismissal and detriment for taking industrial action

28:00 International Labour Standards and the Right to Strike

35:20 The Role of the International Labour Organization

Key quotations:

“The architecture and framework of very coercive [anti-union] legislation has been retained. This Government has modified and repealed aspects of the TU act 2016, and more importantly that terrible piece of legislation the Minimum Services Levels (Strikes) Act 2023, but that requirement of a ballot, those requirements of notification to the employer, though they have been tinkered with and are not as cruel and stringent as they were, they do basically remain the same”. (Professor Novitz)

 “Without some kind of solidarity action being possible […] you had no way to place adequate pressure on the employer to adhere to their collective agreements and to pay workers a reasonable sum for their labour or even to comply with the law” (Professor Novitz on the P&O Ferry dispute)

Welcome to the new 2nd season of the Institute of Employment Rights Podcast. In this episode, Prof Nicola Countouris (UCL & IER) and Lord John Hendy KC (UCL & IER), discuss the implications of the Government's new Employment Rights Act (2025).

Topics covered are:

- Worker Status

- Sectoral bargaining

- Industrial Action Legislation

- Effective remedies for workers

- Could P&O happen again after the Act?

"Having the right to strike doesn't mean you have to exercise it. The point is to have the right in order that workers ultimately have leverage in negotiations."

- Lord John Hendy KC

Without improved support for workers’ right to strike, will Labour’s new Employment Rights Bill leave British workers over-exposed and under-protected?

In conversation with Institute of Employment Rights Director, James Harrison, leading labour law experts Lord John Hendy KC and Prof. Keith Ewing address the failure of the Bill to meet the UK's obligations under international employment law.

They question if the new bodies created under the Bill have the teeth to fill the void left by a properly resourced Ministry of Labour - Britain is one of only a handful of developed nations that do not have a Labour Minister running their own department.

" Businesses, employers will be laughing at unions all the way through the process, because they know that at the end of the day, they can keep the union out."

- Professor Keith Ewing

Pointing to the shortcomings in the Bill regarding the right to strike, union access to workplaces and adequate enforcement agencies, these two industrial law heavyweights raise the prospect that - even under the new legislation - there could be a repeat of the P&O case, where almost 800 sailors were summarily dismissed.

Topics & Questions:

The Right To Strike: Is the UK violating international law by restricting workers' right to strike?

Still No Ministry Of Labour: Will the new Fair Work Agency be strong enough to truly protect workers?

Workplace Access: Can unions overcome the obstacles in Labour's new bill to effectively advocate for workers?

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome

01:26 The Right To Strike: A Fundamental Human Right

02:51 Britain's International Obligations On The Right To Strike

05:15 Electronic Ballots For Strike Action

08:03 Labour Party Commitments Dropped

15:28 Workplace Access Rights For Trade Unions

19:51 Remedies For Unions Vs Employers: A Legal Mis-Match

21:21 Union Access: How It Works Outside The UK

23:21 New Agencies, Limited Powers, No Labour Ministry

28:08 Inadequate Enforcement On Behalf Of Workers

32:28 Thank You For Joining Us

Takeaways:

Workers’ Rights: 

The UK's restrictive strike laws, particularly compared to international standards, undermine workers' bargaining power.

This imbalance makes it harder for unions to negotiate fair wages, secure better working conditions.

It also makes it harder to protect against unfair dismissal, ultimately leaving workers vulnerable to exploitation. 

Inadequate Enforcement: 

Despite the promise of a new Fair Work Agency, its limited powers and narrow focus raise serious doubts about its ability to protect workers. 

Without the ability to prosecute employers or address a wider range of labour violations, the agency may struggle to prevent future mass dismissals and other abuses.

This situation will leave workers reliant on lengthy and costly legal battles to defend their rights - without much confidence of adequate compensation should they win.

Unions Blocked: 

Although Labour's bill offers some positive changes, like simplifying ballot procedures, it falls short of addressing key obstacles to union organising and strike action. 

Unions will still need to navigate complex legal hurdles and employer resistance to gain workplace access and effectively exercise their right to strike.

This highlights the need for strategic planning and continued advocacy for stronger worker protections.

Credits:

The IER podcast is sponsored by Thompsons Solicitors.

For Thompsons resources and advice on Trade Union law visit thompsonstradeunion.law

This podcast is produced for IER by Creative Kin.

To find out more, visit creativekin.co.uk/ier

Recorded at Creative Kin's London studios.

Studio Producer and Editor: Jason Caffrey

Theme Music: Daniel Jorgensen

"This is the first realistic chance we've had to revise the industrial relations structure of this country since Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979."

- Lord John Hendy KC

Will the Employment Rights Bill improve pay and conditions for British workers?

Leading labour law experts Lord John Hendy KC and Prof. Keith Ewing address the absence of sectoral collective bargaining from the Labour government’s new Employment Rights Bill.

These two industrial relations law heavyweights argue that the Bill leaves UK workers vulnerable to exploitation from companies hostile to collective agreements.

"The minimum wage is the ceiling, and there's nothing above it."

- Professor Keith Ewing

They expound Britain’s historical sectoral bargaining arrangements, their evisceration under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the urgent need to reinstate trade union powers to negotiate effectively across entire industries.

Hosted by Institute of Employment Rights Director, James Harrison.

Topics & Questions:

Sectoral Bargaining: Why is it crucial for improving wages and working conditions?

Legislative Limitations: Does the Bill adequately address the need for sectoral bargaining?

Government Responsibility: Should the government take a more active role in promoting sectoral collective bargaining?

Chapters:

00:04 Welcome

02:16 Sectoral Collective Bargaining: Why It Matters

05:19 Britain's Low Collective Coverage

06:50 Minsters Control Bargaining

08:39 Stable Labour Costs And Higher Tax Revenues

11:28 Now Or Never For Collective Bargaining

14:16 US Vs European Model

16:27 Successful Economies Use Sectoral Bargaining

19:43 Recognition Procedures: A Fatal Weakness

24:51 The Outlook for Terms And Conditions

28:49 Thank You For Joining Us

Takeaways:

Sectoral collective bargaining is essential for achieving fair wages, better working conditions, and a more equitable society.

The Employment Rights Bill misses a generational opportunity to strengthen workers' rights by failing to adequately support sectoral bargaining.

Without reform, the UK risks continued wage stagnation and deteriorating working conditions.

Credits:

The IER podcast is sponsored by Thompsons Solicitors.

For Thompsons resources and advice on Trade Union law visit thompsonstradeunion.law

This podcast is produced for IER by Creative Kin.

To find out more, visit creativekin.co.uk/ier

Recorded at Creative Kin's London studios.

Studio Producer and Editor: Jason Caffrey

Theme Music: Daniel Jorgensen

Unmasking the weaknesses in Labour's plan to tackle fire and rehire and zero-hours contracts.

"This is not ending fire and rehire, this is facilitating fire and rehire." - Professor Keith Ewing

In this episode of the Institute of Employment Rights podcast, we delve into the Labour Party's proposed Employment Rights Bill with labour law experts Professor Keith Ewing and Neil Todd.

Topics discussed:

Zero-hours contracts: Do the bill's provisions offer genuine job security and prevent exploitation for workers on these contracts?

Fire and rehire: Does the bill truly ban this practice or does it inadvertently provide a roadmap for employers to continue using it?

Loopholes and limitations: Ewing and Todd highlight potential weaknesses in the bill, including vague definitions, limited enforcement mechanisms, and a lack of compensation for workers who lose their jobs due to fire and rehire.

International examples: The episode explores how other countries, like Australia, have successfully tackled fire and rehire and what lessons the UK can learn.

The role of unions: The experts emphasize the need for stronger unions and greater worker involvement in decision-making processes to prevent exploitative practices.

Key takeaways:

While the Employment Rights Bill offers some positive steps, it falls short of providing comprehensive protection for workers.

Stronger enforcement mechanisms, clearer definitions, and greater union involvement are crucial to ensure fair labour practices.

The UK can learn from international examples to create a more robust and equitable legal framework for workers.

Chapters:

00:35 Welcome

01:28 The Rise of Zero-Hours Contracts: A Backward Step for Workers

12:05 Fire and Rehire: Lessons from the P&O Scandal

18:33 Accountability and Remedy: Where the Bill falls short

22:41 Employment Law Long View: Historical and International Perspectives

29:19 Empowering Unions: The foundation of Workers' Rights Protection

30:00 Thank You

Credits:

The IER podcast is sponsored by Thompsons Solicitors.

For Thompsons resources and advice on Trade Union law visit thompsonstradeunion.law

This podcast is produced for IER by Creative Kin.

To find out more, visit creativekin.co.uk/ier

Recorded at Creative Kin's London studios.

Studio Producer and Editor: Jason Caffrey

Theme Music: Daniel Jorgensen