What does the pledge mean?
Labour’s manifesto promised to make a number of changes to what it called “outdated employment laws” through the implementation of “Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering a New Deal for Working People”, which the party said would include:
- “banning exploitative zero hours contracts”
- “ending fire and rehire”, the practice by which employers dismiss and re-engage employees to change their terms and conditions of employment
- “introducing basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay, and protection from unfair dismissal”, rather than being eligible for these only after a certain amount of time has passed
- changing the remit of the Low Pay Commission “so for the first time it accounts for the cost of living”.
Labour’s manifesto committed to introducing legislation to effect these changes within its first 100 days in government—a deadline of 12 October 2024.
In June 2024, after the publication of its manifesto, Labour published a document outlining proposals for its reform of workers’ rights. As well as the measures outlined above, the party also committed to:
However, Labour said that some of the promises included in the ‘New Deal for Working People’ would take “longer to review and implement”, including “plans to move towards a single status of worker”. It also said it would conduct a review of the system of parental leave within its first year of government.
It is worth noting that employment law is devolved in Northern Ireland, meaning employment law changes in the rest of the UK do not automatically apply.
What progress has been made?
We are rating this pledge as ‘appears off track’, as one of the measures specified in Labour’s manifesto, ”introducing basic rights from day one to [...] protection from unfair dismissal”, will, under current government plans, be introduced six months into employment, not on day one as promised.
If no further revisions are made, we intend to change the rating of this pledge to ‘not kept’ when these proposals pass into law.
Legislation to introduce many of the changes outlined in Labour’s ‘New Deal for Working People’ was presented to Parliament as the Employment Rights Bill on 10 October 2024—within 100 days of Labour entering government, so this part of the pledge has been achieved.
The bill extends and applies to Great Britain as a whole, although not all of its provisions have effect in each of those three nations, while some provisions also apply in Northern Ireland. The bill initially included 28 of the commitments included in Labour’s ‘Plan to Make Work Pay’.
But in November 2025, after the Bill’s passage stalled due to House of Lords amendments returning twice to the Commons, the government confirmed that it would be amending the Bill to change the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from one day of employment (as promised in its manifesto) to six months. The current qualifying period is two years.
The government said “constructive conversations” between trade unions and businesses had led to the change, “to ensure [the Bill] can reach Royal Assent and keep to the Government’s published delivery timeline”.
While the amendment to the Bill still does reduce the qualifying period for unfair dismissal, it’s still higher than the “day one” protection explicitly mentioned in Labour’s manifesto promise, in other literature during the election campaign, and in the original version of the Bill.
In a written statement introducing the Bill in October 2024, then-business secretary Jonathan Reynolds MP said: “By introducing day one protection for unfair dismissal (while allowing employers to operate probation periods) [...] we will raise the bar for workers and provide a baseline of security in work”. He also said the government was “committed to implementing their plan to make work pay in full”.
Other government ministers, Labour MPs and Lords repeated the promise to introduce protection from unfair dismissal “from day one” after winning the election.
On 5 November 2025, employment rights minister Kate Dearden MP said, during a debate on the consideration of the House of Lords’ message: “We remain committed to delivering unfair dismissal protections from day one—not two years, not six months, but day one. That was a clear pledge in our manifesto”.
Following the change outlined in November 2025, several Labour MPs accused the government of breaking its manifesto promise.
In response to a Sky News journalist who said the government had broken a manifesto promise, business secretary Peter Kyle MP said he didn’t accept that the change outlined in November 2025 was a breach of Labour’s manifesto commitments. He said: “The manifesto committed to day one rights, we are delivering day one rights. The manifesto [also] committed us to finding compromise and finding ways that we would never pit employers against employees, and we are delivering on that.”
Assuming the Employment Rights Bill as it now stands becomes law, many of the promises made in the manifesto will be fulfilled, but the pledge to introduce protection from unfair dismissal on day one of employment will not be kept.
The Bill would introduce the following:
- Zero hours contracts: require employers to offer “eligible workers” guaranteed hours, reflecting the hours they regularly work, as opposed to zero hours contracts.
This is not a full ban on zero hours contracts. Eligible workers can reject an offer of guaranteed hours, but ministers say these changes will end “exploitative” zero hours contracts, while enabling flexibility for some workers who prefer a zero hours contract.
- ‘Fire and rehire’: restrict the use of this practice by amending the law on unfair dismissal to ordinarily treat those dismissals as automatically unfair, except in cases where the employer was facing financial circumstances likely to affect their viability, and the contract changes were unavoidable to mitigate those financial circumstances.
In these cases, an employment tribunal will still need to consider whether the dismissal was fair in the circumstances. While Labour’s plan pledged to end fire and rehire, it did caveat this, saying: “It is important that businesses can restructure to remain viable, to preserve their workforce and the company when there is genuinely no alternative”.
- Introduce some workers’ rights from day one: this includes parental leave and sick pay.
- Flexible working: amend the existing right to request flexible working from day one, to require employers to “explain the grounds” for rejecting requests, and to require their rejections be “reasonable”.
Other changes promised in Labour’s manifesto are being progressed outside of the Employment Rights Bill.
In July 2024, the government wrote to the Low Pay Commission to update its remit, as pledged in the manifesto, with the new remit coming into effect in September 2024. And in July 2025, the government launched a review of the parental leave system.
