Good Jobs – Why Enhanced Rights Won’t Turn the Curve

The Good Jobs Bill is built on a good instinct. Work should be fair. People should be treated with dignity. Employment rights matter.

But good intentions do not automatically make good policy. And right now, Northern Ireland is not just risking but directly confusing more regulation with better work. Having worked and led businesses over the past two decades in both unionised and non-unionised environments, I have seen what creates genuinely good jobs in practice.

I have seen the value of consistency, structure and worker voice. I have seen union-led learning transform confidence and capability. I have also seen how flexibility, trust and responsiveness in smaller organisations can unlock productivity and innovation at speed. Businesses where the partnership and personal bond between owner and their team is the secret sauce no formal structure can ever replicate.

Good work is rarely created by legislation alone.

It is created when employers, employees and government work together to shape jobs that are productive, adaptable and developmental.

This is where this Bill falls short.

It strengthens process but says too little about performance. It creates obligations but offers no institutional support for partnership. It talks about fairness but says too little about the skills and health challenges holding back participation and growth. This matters because Northern Ireland’s labour market is not fundamentally suffering from a lack of employment law.
It is suffering from deeper structural weaknesses:

1. persistent skills shortages across key sectors  
2. high economic inactivity linked to long-term sickness  
3. weak productivity growth  
4. rising concern around youth unemployment and labour market entry

These are not issues that procedural reform alone can solve. There is a real risk that if implemented without broader reform, the Bill delivers three unintended consequences.

First, it could push employers, particularly SMEs, toward defensive compliance rather than workforce investment. The impact of this will be stark, NI is a SME economy and lack of growth in these businesses will suffocate supply chains, regional balance and productivity.

Second, it could make labour market entry harder for younger and less experienced workers at precisely the wrong moment. We have seen violence on our streets in Londonderry / Derry, East Belfast, drug deaths, suicide and a despair, even anger, in young people not seen for decades. At a time when parts of Northern Ireland are already grappling with deep social strain, from mental ill-health to disengagement and reduced economic participation among younger people, any reform that inadvertently narrows labour market entry routes would carry consequences well beyond employment statistics.

Third, it could create more formal process without creating the trust and partnership needed to reduce workplace conflict. Legislation can establish minimum standards, but most of the legislation just extends the reach rather than supporting an outcome. That is not good legislation.
At best and broadest the legislation creates a new base with no ambition or insight as to how it will deliver change. That is a low bar for success and impact.

The remainder will need to be built through:
–    co-created job design  
–    investment in learning and progression  
–    social dialogue that builds trust rather than procedural confrontation

This is why Northern Ireland needs more than a bill with the term “good jobs” tagged on. It needs a Good Jobs settlement. That means embedding a Right to Learn. It means creating stronger routes for union learning and workforce upskilling. It means building  social partnership infrastructure, building understanding, trust and long-term planning for activity. It also means an economic plan for Northern Ireland.

The original principles that founded the trade union movement were protection of workers from exploitation, helping people access learning and progression, resolving disputes constructively and acting as a stabilising influence in difficult organisational change. This legislation does some of this but also moves toward some of the areas that concern employers, and this must be recognised:

• overly procedural rather than relational – focused on process and not problem solving
• adversarial by default, assumes conflict over partnership
• aligned too closely to philosophical positions than delivering improved workplace outcomes
• protection of existing structures at the expense of adaptation that risks missing the need to enable workforce redesign, innovation or productivity reform 
• does not address inconsistency in representative quality, this is vital, excellent local reps build trust, poor one’s damage relationships, often permanently

Where trade unionism is strongest, it builds capability, trust, learning and constructive challenge. Where it becomes overly procedural, reflexively adversarial or resistant to adaptation, it risks drifting from the principles that made it relevant and impactful in the first place.

Northern Ireland cannot afford to build labour market policy around the assumptions of the economy we have left behind, shaped by post-pandemic adjustments, demographic changes and sustained energy cost volatility.
Energy volatility, technological disruption, demographic pressure, youth disengagement and global competitive strain demand something more ambitious than procedural reform.

This Bill may strengthen baseline protections, especially in things like ‘fire and re-hire”. But unless it is matched by a serious settlement around learning, productivity and social partnership economic growth will at best stall, or worse shrink. 

We are legislating for the last decade not the next decade.
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That would not be good enough for workers, employers or Northern Ireland’s future.