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How a Tory Brexit could finally unite Britain’s workers

<span>Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

It is not unreasonable for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and assorted organisations concerned with the nation’s prosperity, to concentrate on the future of the customs union – or more precisely, what the future for British workers will look like without it. “The jobs or wages of men with low formal qualifications working in skilled manual occupations may be under particular threat,” remarked Agnes Norris Keiller, author of the IFS report, leaving “as you might expect, if you decimate your manufacturing sector” judiciously unsaid.

Related: What Johnson's deal means for workers' rights, the NHS and the economy

However, the trade union movement is looking just as keenly at what Boris Johnson’s agreement means for workers’ rights. For four decades the EU has set minimum standards in the workplace on protection from discrimination, pregnancy, maternity and paternity rights, part-time, fixed term and agency workers’ rights, the famous working time directive, and holiday pay, and health and safety.

There were clearly areas in which the EU did not do enough – most glaringly, on zero-hours contracts. Yet the bid by the handful of Labour MPs determined to vote through Johnson’s deal – to decry the EU as a set of capitalist institutions, without any social basis – is cynical. Such rights as UK workers currently enjoy have been enshrined by European law. Without provision for the protection and enforcement of those rights, they could be dismantled by a Conservative government at any time.

To recap the Conservatives’ record on this: in 2011, after the coalition government came in, David Cameron’s strategy chief Steve Hilton reportedly flew the kite of suspending maternity leave, just temporarily, while they repaired the “damage done by the last Labour government”. He would have been prevented by EU law. However, employment tribunal fees were introduced, which effectively curtailed maternity and other rights by making it expensive – often prohibitively – for an employee to enforce them. (These fees were subsequently ruled unlawful by the supreme court.)

They increased the qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims from one to two years’ employment; imposed a cap on compensation for this of one year’s pay; and after their election victory in 2015, the Tories brought in the notorious Trade Union Act to make collective action – specifically strike action – harder.

To reassure workers about a future Conservative government, last week’s Queen’s speech would have had to include three things: the promise of a “standstill”, so that existing rights couldn’t be rolled back; the promise of dynamic alignment with the EU on those existing rights, in the case of their extension; and a statement of intention on workers’ rights legislation, to meet the new challenges of insecurity and low wages. The speech mentioned none of those things.

Piece together the Conservative party’s track record with its present rhetoric, or lack of it, and you have to accept deregulation of the workplace and disempowerment of the individual as the inevitable and deliberate consequences of this form of Brexit.

And this is where they may have laid a bear-trap for themselves in the coming election. Despite those moves under Cameron, the steady erosion of workplace rights over the past decade was not pinned on any single political party. Rather, it was understood as something more amorphous: the pressures of the market, the “new rules” of the innovators, and as such, the price of modernity.

The introduction of tribunal fees and the undermining of union power paled into insignificance beside the far more alarming stories: the woman who gave birth in the toilet of a Sports Direct warehouse because she was afraid of missing her shift; the hyper-surveillance practices at Amazon; the heads-we-win, tails-you-lose employment model of Deliveroo and Uber, where everyone is self-employed, but no one is emancipated.

“Zero hours” became a shorthand, an umbrella term for a gig economy in which the balance of power was skewed so remarkably, so suddenly toward the employer that the much slower, more iterative cogs of parliament were seen as more or less irrelevant to it. And the issue itself, although vast – insecurity, underemployment, low wages, dehumanised conditions, poor career progression, the impossibility of collective action when the job itself is precarious, all feeding into one another in a feedback loop – was seen as the new normal, which only the kind of unhelpful people who intervene with words such as “structural” and “inequality” would talk about.

A government that, explicitly or implicitly, sets out to unpick rights that people have understood and relied on for decades changes the debate entirely. The right to paid holiday, for example, may have become largely theoretical to people working “flexibly”; once it comes under threat for the general workforce, new axes of solidarity will inevitably form.

It will not be possible to fight to retain this right without extending the battle to include those in precarious jobs. The fight for maternity leave will extend to those who have slipped though the net of its provision. The unions, particularly the GMB, are already considering how best to bring together, mobilise and empower workers who exist outside the traditional institutions of collective action. The threat to rights this current Brexit presents does more than draw attention to a deeper erosion that has evolved over the course of this century: it brings an impetus, unity and urgency to the resistance that industrial tensions have so far lacked. And, if it all unfolds according to the Conservatives’ strategic vision, just in time for a general election.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist