Pro-EU group of MPs challenge Theresa May to protect employment rights

A new cross-party group set up by pro-remain MPs from the EU referendum campaign has challenged the prime minister to provide commitments that employment rights provided for under EU law would be protected following Brexit.

A range of those rights – including protections for young workers for annual leave and rest breaks – would be lost after Brexit unless the government draws up new laws to replace them, according to Labour MP Chuka Umunna, chair of the Vote Leave Watch group.

He wrote to Theresa May after commissioning the House of Commons library to list the employment rights that currently arise due to the UK’s membership of the European Union, and which he said would “fall away” on departure from the union.

“You owe it to the working people of Britain to make clear that the pledges made by your cabinet colleagues to retain EU legislation on workers’ rights will be delivered,” Umunna says in the letter.

Vote Leave Watch said that the government could preserve workers’ rights by passing legislation to replace EU laws, such as the working time directive, that will cease to apply to the UK upon Brexit. It also called on the government to conduct an audit of all instances where decisions of the European court of justice have created greater legal employment rights for British workers, and then commit to enshrine these rights in law.

John Hannett, general secretary of the USDAW union and a patron of Vote Leave Watch, said that British workers had been protected from “discrimination, unscrupulous bosses, and the worst excesses of Tory governments” as a result of Britain’s membership of the EU. “The prime minister came to office talking a good game about standing up for working people,” he added. “She now has to walk the walk – and the first part of that should be guaranteeing that every single right for workers delivered by the European Union will stay in place.”

Commentators such as Philip Landau, an employment law solicitor, have said that there is unlikely to be a major shift in terms of employment rights and that most EU laws in the area would be retained.

He argued in the Guardian in May that the level of protection afforded to workers is so woven into the fabric of the employment relationship that their wholesale removal would not only be unexpected by employers, but would be politically unthinkable for any government.