The employment bill wasn’t just about flexible working – and its delay matters for women

Last Friday, just as you were settling in to watch Gogglebox, no doubt eager to hear yet another hot take on the Will Smith slap, the UK government was landing a sucker punch of its own. As it sometimes does when we’re distracted by the arrival of the weekend, it snuck out the news that its long-awaited Employment Bill would once again be postponed.

For those of us that follow the really boring daily stuff that happens in parliament, this was somewhat expected. Back in December, business minister Paul Scully had said ministers would bring the bill forward ‘when Parliamentary time allows it’. That’s kind of like telling your kids ‘we’ll see’.

This isn’t the only time the bill has been delayed. It first appeared in the 2019 Queen’s Speech, which is basically a very fancy to-do list setting out what laws the government intends to pass. Hopes were raised, only to be repeatedly dashed as the legislation was kicked further into the long grass, partly due to Covid.

This time, the news broke in the Financial Times beneath a headline that read ‘UK postponing plans to give workers the right to flexible employment’. For campaigners and trade unions, the news was a huge blow. The formidable Mother Pukka has been relentless with her Flex Appeal campaign for years. When I worked at Pregnant Then Screwed, we’d also launched the #FlexForAll campaign and had supported two previous bills that attempted to make flexible working the default. Collectively, we had all hoped that the shift in work practices during the pandemic had done enough to solidify the case for reform. Clearly not.

The disappointment is understandable. I feel it too. However, with all the headlines focusing on flexible working, it’s easy to ignore that this bill meant so much more for women than just that one measure. Aside from flexible working, the bill promised to create a new enforcement body to give workers greater protection. It also contained several other measures that would have made workplaces fairer for women. It would have ensured that tips left for workers go to them in full and it would have created a new right to request a more predictable contract after a specific period of time. It’s often the case that the ‘right to request’ anything at work is the lowest common denominator in employment law – it translates as ‘you can ask but it doesn’t mean you’ll get’. However, both of these measures would have been important for women. Why? Because evidence shows that we earn less and we’re more likely to work in insecure jobs because they offer the flexibility we need to manage all the unpaid care we do.

The Bill was also due to extend redundancy protections to prevent pregnancy and maternity discrimination, allow parents to take extended leave for neonatal care and introduce an entitlement to one week of leave for unpaid carers – again, a group predominantly made up of women. None of these measures have made it into law and that is as much an outrage as the delay to flexible working.

The issues of flexibility and insecure work are interwoven, and this bill, though imperfect, would have gone some way to addressing both. But in reducing the bill down to the single issue of flexible working we’re failing to recognise the reality of so many women’s lives, the precarity of their work and income, and the choices made for them by a Government that repeatedly says “we’ll see”.

The last in-person event I attended before the pandemic was the TUC Women’s Conference, where I spoke on a panel about the campaign to make all jobs flexible. A woman in the back of the room stood up and challenged me. She said that as a retail worker the onus was on her to be flexible for her employer, but that it was rarely reciprocated. In her sector, zero-hour contracts trumped flexibility. She made clear that the discourse on flexible working often excluded women like her because it was too heavily focused on office workers in permanent employment. She was angry – and she was right.

Through the peak of the pandemic, and when queuing behind a perspex screen in Asda, I often thought about that woman. That sounds very earnest – like the saccharine solidarity that is best suited to Twitter – but it’s true. While I sat safely at home behind my laptop for two years, women like her kept the economy turning and ensured we could still buy the food we needed, only to be rewarded by having their shifts cancelled at a moment’s notice.

Now, women like her are at the sharp end of a different crisis – the cost of living. Low-pay, insecure contracts and a lack of compensation when shifts are cancelled remain the norm at a time when every penny counts. The Living Wage Foundation recently reported that 17% of workers that had their shifts cancelled at short notice ended up paying higher childcare fees as a result. In a world where 800 P&O workers can be sacked in a 30-minute Zoom call, we needed more than faux-outrage by ministers. We needed this Employment Bill.

Yes, flexible working needs reform. Yes, it is vital if we’re going to create better access to work for everyone. But we don’t just need to flex our working patterns – we need to flex our thinking too. We need to remember that the needs of women at work go beyond a single silver bullet solution and are built on something more basic – the right to a decent, secure living. That’s why this Employment Bill mattered. Because it addressed some (not all) of the ways that women’s livelihoods hang in the balance.

If there is anything good to come from Friday’s news it is the renewed determination to get a stronger, better Employment Bill back on the agenda. But in doing so we need to take the fight beyond flexible working and towards something more fundamental – fairer working for all.