However, many of the measures remain in early and undefined stages. What will this all look like in practice?

“There’s things that we’ve got to get right”. Nowak adds, “there is going to be lots of wrangling over the next few months and the next year over detail of the Employment Rights Act, we’ve got to make sure the Act, from our perspective, is absolutely watertight, it does what it says it’s going to do, delivers real benefits in workplaces”.

“I think that Dave Penman will play a really important role… Not only as the General Secretary of the FDA, but on the ACAS Council as well”.

Penman was appointed to ACAS’s independent governing body in 2025. The Council governs the organisation’s strategic direction, policies and priorities – including their Codes of Practice, which set the minimum standard of fairness that employers should follow. In the coming months, new Codes of Practice will be produced to ensure employers and workers understand the changes made in the ERA.

Beyond the legislation, the ERA represents an important moment for industrial relations. Nowak says he thinks “the ERA is really important to just setting down a marker that says, actually, we think when people go to work, they should be treated with respect, they should be able to have decent wages, and they should have some job security.

“[Roughly] eight million people will get sick pay from day one for the first time starting in April because of that ERA that unions campaigned for. So the Act in and of itself… is really important. But we are interested in a wider sort of conversation about the role that unions play in the modern economy.

“I talk to employers’ representatives all the time. I think there’s shared agendas around things like skills, how we improve the skills system in this country, how we get employees to invest more in skills… how we solve the UK’s long-running productivity problem”.

On the productivity point, Nowak highlights the TUC’s assessment, cited by the Department for Business and Trade, which found the ERA could generate “something like a £10 billion productivity boost to the UK economy through reduced absenteeism, more effective employee engagement, reducing the costs disputes”.

The TUC acts as the coordinating body for its 47 affiliate member unions, collectively representing 5.3 million workers across the UK. It is a stakeholder of government, and the General Secretary is often given the opportunity to see the civil service in operation.

What is Nowak’s experience of working with the civil service? “Civil servants get a bad press… no service is perfect, but I’ve been incredibly impressed by the work that civil servants have done”.

He points to the ERA as an example of this. “Labour came into government in July 2024 with a commitment to bring forward the Employment Rights Bill within the first 100 days of a Labour government. That was a huge ask. And that involved people that were working in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office and MCHLG in the DBT, right across government. And it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the work of civil servants… if you’ve got a government that is serious about delivering change, and that was the one word on the front of Labour’s manifesto in July 2024, then you need a civil service that’s geared up to deliver that change as well… I think the civil service has proven that it’s up to the task”.

One of the roles Nowak held at the TUC prior to becoming General Secretary was Head of Organising – helping unions to increase their influence by growing membership, training union officials, and capitalising on workplace issues.

Over the last decade the FDA’s membership has grown by 75% to unprecedented levels. However, as whole, union membership across the UK has remained static. From his position as TUC General Secretary, working across the union movement, what is Nowak’s reading of this trend?

“If you look across the last four or five years, our membership has basically been flat…In the public sector, we went through…  years of austerity, pay freezes, pay caps, dramatically cut the number of people working in the public sector, and then we went through Brexit, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis. The fact that unions have managed to maintain their membership, I think, is a small positive”.

However, he warns, “none of us can be complacent or happy that union membership, particularly in the private sector, is effectively a minority sport. Seven in eight workers in the private sector won’t be union members, and that’s a problem. We’ve really got to think about how we reach out to those non-union members. I think we’ve got an opportunity with the ERA to use those new provisions in the private sector, in particular, to go out and, and raise our membership and make unions relevant to the next generation of workers.

“I’m confident that we can use the legislation to grow. I don’t want to take away from the efforts that unions have made in the last few years because I think we’ve had unions organising in quite difficult circumstances, a hostile political environment, in the private service sector in particular, big issues around access to workers and all the rest of it. But we have got to use this new legislation to grow and to take trade unionism up to the next generation of workers.”

“For me, the real test of the ERA… will be, in three- or four-years’ time, have we grown trade unions? Have we taken trade unions into more workplaces? Have we made trade unions more representative, more diverse? I think that’s a big collective challenge to the whole of the movement.”

Nowak names examples of unions already doing innovative work to grow membership in the private sector, including GMB who have signed agreements with Uber and Deliveroo. GMB have taken employers to court “to prove that these are workers. I think the more that we can, break into those new areas, the better, the platform economy”.

He also points to the work Bectu, Equity and the Musicians’ Union are doing “organising in what was the original gig economy… to support members when they don’t have a traditional workplace or a traditional relationship with, with an employer”.

Nowak says the TUC are looking at these examples closely. “If you think about the scale of the organising challenge, there’s what twenty-five, twenty-six million people out there who aren’t members of any union whatsoever. We’re not going to organise them workplace by workplace, individual member by individual member. We’re going to have to think about how we scale up our organising efforts across whole sectors, and I think that requires unions to work together”.

To ensure sustained growth, unions must ensure that they have a strong and organised rep base, that continues to grow with their membership. “Reps are the backbone of the trades union movement. It sounds like a cliché but it’s absolutely true”, continues Nowak, “it’s what sets us apart… we’re not a think-tank, we’re not just lobbying organisations, we’re not a legal organisation – we’re a trades union movement. Our uniqueness is based on the fact we’ve got people in workplaces who understand the issues that matter to their colleagues, who understand their work, who’ve got the relationships with managers. And the more people we’ve got active at the workplace, the more lay representatives… the more likely we are to prove that we’re relevant to members, the more likely we are to get good outcomes for members”.

Nowak doesn’t want the ERA to result in a huge spike in employment tribunal cases. “I think that would be an absolute failure”. What he wants to see is “union reps, standing up for their members locally, negotiating with employers locally, resolving disputes at a workplace level. That’s the real value of unions. Nobody wants to get bound up in complex, expensive legal processes”.

“I’ve got a huge amount of time and respect for Dave Penman. I think he does an incredible job as FDA General Secretary. But ultimately, unions aren’t just about General Secretaries or full-time officers. It’s about the local rep. And if you’ve got a good local rep who’s visible, who’s confident, who’s been trained by the union, then people are more likely to join the union and more likely to think the union’s doing a good job.

“The more local reps we’ve got, the better… the more diverse our reps base, the better as well… We do have to open our, open up our rep space to more women, more Black workers, more young workers as well, because we want a genuinely representative diverse base”.

He adds that the ERA also brings new opportunities for unions to grow rep numbers with new rights for equality reps. “We saw this previously under the last Labour government with union learning reps, who brought people into reps’ roles that didn’t necessarily want to be the office rep or the shop steward, but were interested in doing the work around union learning. I think we need to open up unions to as many opportunities as possible to get involved in unions”.

Union learning – the education and skills functions of trade unions – not only provides an opportunity for more reps to get involved, for the FDA it has been a successful recruiter too. FDA Learn, which provides high-quality learning and development to approximately 9,000 civil servants every year, has seen members join the union to access resources such as our Civil Service Strengths workshops, who had never previously considered joining a union.

“If you go back to 1868”, says Nowak, “the founding meeting of the TUC, vocational training was on the agenda. Education, training, and skills have always been part and parcel of what we do…, it’s part of our DNA”.

“UK employers spend about half the EU average on education and training”, he continued. “I think we’ve got to ask UK employers to raise their game”.