NI Good Jobs Bill: Bigger Questions Left Unheard and Unanswered

Northern Ireland's Good Jobs Employment Rights Bill is heading toward Assembly scrutiny, and the positions are hardening in the way these things do. Business organisations, understandably, are coordinating around concerns about cost, complexity and timing. Trade unions are pressing for stronger enforcement and broader collective rights. Both camps are increasingly talking past each other, and increasingly talking at government rather than to it.

I understand why. Business genuinely fears cost and loss of flexibility over how it engages with its workforces. Trade unions genuinely fear that, after a long wait for reform, the Bill could be diluted or delayed before it ever reaches the statute book. Both fears are rational. Both positions are defensible on their own terms.
But both positions share a weakness: neither side has been asked, and neither side has answered, what Northern Ireland's labour market should look like in 2030, with or without this legislation. Until that question is on the table, we are negotiating the present while the future arrives anyway.

The loss frame, and why it produces small thinking
When people feel they are at risk of losing something, whether money, control, leverage, protections, they become defensive. That's not a flaw in either business or the trade union movement. It's how negotiating positions form when stakes feel high and trust is low. The difficulty is that a loss frame narrows the conversation to who wins and who loses on the Bill as drafted, rather than what either side wants the world of work in Northern Ireland to look like a decade from now.

That's worth sitting with for a moment, because neither side currently has a good answer to it. If the Bill passes broadly as planned, which worker's working life will be materially better in 2029, and how? If AI and automation continue reshaping roles at their current pace, and the evidence says they will, which provisions of this Bill will still be doing meaningful work by 2030, and which will have been quietly overtaken by a labour market that has moved on?

An engagement forum should be debating this, a genuine social dialogue and partnership would be building trust and engagement. In this dialogue some of the answers will be uncomfortable for everyone, and that discomfort is exactly where a more useful conversation begins. How this bill emerged and the gestation period has been bad for everyone and the Department for Economy need to reflect on this.

What the Bill does, and what it leaves unfinished
To be clear: the Good Jobs Bill addresses real problems. Insecure hours, fire and rehire, weak pay transparency, and especially miscarriage leave, these are legitimate issues and the Bill deserves serious scrutiny rather than reflexive opposition or uncritical support.

But it appears to have been substantially shaped by labour market conditions as they stood over the past decade. And one of its most structurally significant provisions, a new right for trade unions to access workplaces, including digitally, alongside a lowered recognition threshold, sits at the centre of a much bigger question that I don't think has had the attention it deserves: why is voice and representation the dimension of "good work" that legislation has chosen to prioritise, when frameworks like Carnegie's Measuring Good Work identify seven dimensions, including job design, wellbeing, and management quality, that arguably shape people's day-to-day experience of work just as much, if not more?

There's a coherent argument that voice and representation is the dimension where legislation is the right tool, because it's about institutional architecture, rights and access, which law does well, while job design and management quality are shaped by culture and practice, which law struggles to mandate directly. There's also a less comfortable possibility: that this is the dimension with an organised constituency pushing hardest for legislative change, while the dimensions that may matter more to people's daily experience of work were left to guidance and codes of practice because no one was pushing as hard for them.

What New Zealand actually tells us
The Department has explicitly looked to New Zealand's Employment Relations Act 2000 as a model for the access right. It's worth understanding what that Act actually was, and what it actually did.

The 2000 Act was a deliberate course correction after a decade of extreme labour market deregulation under the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, a reform explicitly framed by its architect as "a statutory framework for balance in the workplace." It went well beyond access rights: good faith obligations between employers and unions, mediation as the first port of call for disputes, a dedicated Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court. Access rights were one part of a much larger institutional ecosystem.

And a quarter-century on, the evidence is sobering for anyone expecting legislative architecture alone to transform outcomes. Collective bargaining coverage continued to decline for years after the 2000 Act came into force, the opposite of what the reform intended. Research in the early 2000s found no sustained growth in collective bargaining despite the new framework. And going back further, the deregulation of the 1990s, which removed union influence and collective bargaining from much of the economy, produced no clear evidence of improved productivity either.

Neither direction of travel, on its own, appears to have been the dominant driver of New Zealand's economic outcomes.

The lesson I take from this isn't that voice and representation rights don't matter. It's that legislative architecture, transplanted without the wider ecosystem that gave it meaning in its country of origin, and without a parallel strategy on skills, productivity and firm capability, is unlikely to be transformative on its own. That's not an argument against the Good Jobs Bill. It's an argument against treating it as sufficient.

The bigger shift neither side has reckoned with
While the debate over the Bill continues, something larger is already underway. AI and digital technology aren't coming for "jobs" as abstract categories, they're reshaping tasks and roles from the inside, in factories and offices, across every sector. The data is unambiguous: the fastest-changing occupational profiles are concentrated in exactly the sectors that matter most to Northern Ireland's growth ambitions. Skills demand is shifting faster than training systems can respond, and training participation drops away precisely when workers most need it, after the first few months in a job.

In that context, a Bill focused primarily on terms, conditions and representation, without a parallel commitment to a Right to Learn, to genuine social partnership infrastructure, and to shared ownership of how work itself is redesigned as technology changes it, risks being a regulatory response to the world as it was, just as the world moves on.

For business, the redesign of roles driven by AI and automation is happening now, regardless of what this Bill says. The choice is whether that redesign happens unilaterally, with the resistance, turnover and risk that tends to follow, or with structured employee input, which the evidence consistently shows produces better outcomes for everyone, including the bottom line.

For trade unions, a model of influence built around bargaining over terms and conditions in stable job descriptions is increasingly inadequate when the job description itself is what's changing. Being in the room when roles are redesigned is, I'd suggest, more consequential for members' futures than recognition thresholds alone.

Where this leaves us
The Bill could be described as a floor. Elements are absolutely essential and necessary, and it deserves to proceed to serious, evidence-led scrutiny. But a floor is not a strategy, and the question that should be occupying everyone involved, government, business, unions, and the Assembly committees now beginning their work, is what sits above it.

A Right to Learn. Social partnership body with a genuine mandate, something Northern Ireland has never had. A shared commitment to co-designing how AI and automation reshape work, rather than leaving that to happen unilaterally or fighting it after the fact.
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None of that requires anyone to give up their current position on the Bill. It requires everyone to recognise that the Bill was wrong answer to the question. Start, now, on the conversation about what the right of the answer looks like. The alternative is a labour market settlement built for 2024, defended fiercely by everyone, while 2030 arrives regardless.