May 16th 2026

In July 2024, the Department for the Economy unveiled what it described as the most substantial overhaul of Northern Ireland’s employment law in a decade. The Good Jobs bill will include around 50 new measures – including day one employment rights, increased recognition of trade unions in small businesses and replacing zero hours contracts. In reality, NI is playing catch-up to the raft of new employment legislation brought in by the UK Labour government.

The proposed NI legislation was billed as delivering meaningful reform for both employers and employees Indeed, writing recently in Belfast Live , Sinn Féin’s Declan Kearney was positively gushing about the social peace that will follow the legislation, declaring that “workplace relations between employers and employees do not have to be contentious. Social dialogue provides the mechanism with which to meet the challenges facing the regional and national economies. …The ‘Good Jobs’ Employment Rights legislation will help to rebalance the economy in the interests of businesses, investors and workers.”

Who needs socialism when capitalism with some rights for workers will deliver peace and prosperity? James Connolly, who Kearney and Sinn Féin (wrongly) claim as a forebear, had a different attitude. Writing in 1901, Connolly said, “the very basis of Society today is a struggle between two classes, the Landlord and Capitalist who own all the means of production, and the propertyless class who are only allowed to use and operate these means of life when it suits the convenience or interest of members of the other class to allow them”.

Slow Progress

As with so much in Stormont, the business of passing the bill has been slow and tortuous. The bill is now expected to be submitted to the Executive for approval in the coming weeks, with the aim of reaching the Economy Committee for scrutiny by the end of May.

With just under 14 months remaining in the Assembly’s mandate, the timetable for passing this legislation is increasingly tight. According to lawyer Leeanne Armstrong , “where the bill is in the process now, there is a real risk that the bill may not pass before the end of the current mandate". It is time for the Executive Parties to outline the details and timetable for the implementation of the Good Jobs bill. It is important for the working-class people of Northern Ireland to know if the bill will have all the rights that workers across the United Kingdom now have since the legislation was passed in the new Workers Rights Act at Westminster. Whilst that legislation does not provide all the rights and protections the Workers Party would like to have seen and will certainly not lead to the utopian social democratic class peace that Mr Kearney expects, it was a step in the right direction.

The Executive Parties have always been keen to follow Westminster when it comes to cuts in welfare benefits claiming that they had no option. It is now an ideal opportunity for them to provide stronger provisions and protections for workers in the good jobs bill for workers in Northern Ireland, as the legislation is a matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

A Good Jobs bill with stronger protections and rights for workers coupled with a comprehensive fully funded anti-poverty strategy could be the first small steps in tackling the generational inequalities that the working-class communities across Northern Ireland have suffered for decades. It is now time for them to see and feel the benefits of the 'peace dividend'.

I note that the USA has been quoted in some quarters as an exemplar. Declan Kearney states that in US states with higher union density and collective bargaining rights, there are higher wages and ‘the presence of unions lifts all boats. The north's regional economy is increasingly attracting Foreign Direct Investment". Leaving aside the spectacle of a self-described 'socialist republican' in full-throated praise of capitalist foreign investment, Mr Kearney ignores some salient facts. It is bad enough that we are having the USA model of private healthcare foisted on us, we most certainly do not want to emulate the employment practices of a nation whose minimum wage has been sitting at 7.50 dollars per hour since 2009 and whose workers work on average three hundred more hours per year than their UK equivalents.

Writing in 1899 , James Connolly declared that the socialist party “ha[s] at once a programme of political reform embracing all and more than the old reform parties had striven for, and a programme embodying demands for economic changes which receive no support from middle-class reformers, though a crying necessity of the times”. The Workers Party is aware that working class people will only achieve equality and prosperity through a socialist system of government and that capitalism which exploits our class will not and cannot be reformed and must be dismantled. But in the here and now, the Workers Party will stand shoulder to shoulder with workers who demand their rights as the real producers of wealth across the globe.