November 2024
In this episode of the Future of Work Hub's In Conversation podcast, Lucy Lewis reflects on the impact of recent global elections on the future of workplace regulation. Join Lucy and partners James Davies and David Hopper as they explore emerging global trends and their implications for the UK. Discover how political shifts are reshaping the employer-employee relationships and union influence in an increasingly volatile and uncertain landscape.
Key Takeaways:
Stay on top political changes: Global trends show a fragmented political landscape, evolving social values and rising populism. New governments often bring regulatory changes impacting employment rights and union power, and creating periods of post-election upheaval and uncertainty for businesses. Monitoring political change and its impact on the world of work should be high on the business agenda.
Navigate increasingly divergent rules and regulations: There’s a shift from global harmonisation to a multi-system world where different countries and different regions have different laws and regulations. It is crucial for global organisations to track cross-border regulation where approaches are diverging, especially in areas like data privacy, AI and DE&I.
Monitor and manage workplace division: As the workplace becomes more diverse, more inter-generational and more international, managing conflict and differing views in the workplace is essential. Developing organisational capability and skilled leaders in conflict resolution is a strategic priority.
Create an environment to support employee voice: Employee expectations have been evolving over a number of years. Employees want to be heard on broader organisational issues, not just pay and conditions. Proactively building mechanisms to promote employee voice in the workplace can boost organisational performance and innovation by creating a trusted environment that effectively manages employee concerns. This will be of growing importance where there are strong political drivers to create a more supportive environment for unions.
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation…’ podcast. I'm your host, Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin's employment team. Whether you're a seasoned listener or this is your first time, I'm delighted you're here to join me for some fascinating conversations with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders exploring some of the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.
Now, it's been a record year for elections with more than 60 countries, so home to about half the world's populations, holding elections. And perhaps inevitably, those elections have shaped the political and economic agenda. In many cases, workplace rights have been a key battleground - and that has meant business has been faced with real uncertainty this year as the legislative agenda in many countries has been in a state of flux.
As we near the end of the year and with the US election now behind us, we're going to look ahead and start to think about what these political changes mean for the future direction of travel for employment regulation and for employment rights. And, as we know, it's not just legislative change that's the only driver shaping the world of work, but the relationship between employers and the people that work for them is also changing. So, we're going to look at the evolving landscape of union influence and how that's shaping the idea of the “employment deal”. So, although we're going to take a sweep across the globe for some bigger picture insights and emerging trends, we're going to take a deeper look at what this means in the UK where the legislative agenda has now been set.
There's a lot for employers to be thinking about and to help you navigate your way, I'm delighted to be speaking today to two fellow partners here at Lewis Silkin. Many of our avid followers of this podcast will know James. James is the founder partner of Lewis Silkin's employment team, and he writes and speaks widely both nationally and internationally on workplace regulation and on the future of work. He's appeared on this podcast many times. So, welcome back James.
I'm also joined by David Hopper. David is another partner in Lewis Silkin's employment team, and he's got particular expertise in industrial relations and collective employment law. So great to have you too, David.
Political direction of travel following an unprecedent year of global elections
Lucy Lewis: James, I thought we'd start by coming to you. As I said at the beginning, we've had this unprecedented year of global elections and a good place to start seems to be by looking at what those election outcomes can tell us about the political direction of travel, both here in the UK but also globally, particularly now that we've got Trump back in the White House. So, I thought we could start by you sharing your insights with us on that.
James Davies: Of course. It's been a year of significant elections, most recently the triumph of Trump and the Republicans in the States. We've also had elections in very populous countries such as Mexico and India, we've had the British elections, we've had elections in France, Belgium, Portugal and Austria.
Looking at the outcomes from these various elections, there are two trends that I think are particularly noticeable. Firstly, the fact that incumbents generally have struggled. And secondly, the rise of populists - particularly right-wing populists - in many of these countries. I think Donald Trump in the States is the sort of paradigm example of right-wing populism coming to the fore.
In Western Europe in particular, we have seen a rise in right-wing populism across almost all of these countries but one feature that we see across Western Europe is that political parties rely on coalitions to govern. In fact, of the 15 major European economies, the UK is unique in having a government that isn't in coalition in governing the country. And one of the things that we've seen in France and Austria being recent examples of this, is that the right-wing populists can struggle to make enough friends to form coalition governments. The obvious example where they have succeeded is Italy, where Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party are governing a coalition with other right-wing parties. In Finland and in the Netherlands, we have populists that have formed part of a coalition, but they are in coalition with a variety of other political parties and are far from running those countries.
Another thing looking at the populists is how difficult it is to pigeonhole populism. The label populism is given to a lot of different parties, and they cover a whole host of different political ideologies and philosophies.
As I grew up, we had a centre-left and a centre-right government - Labour and Conservative - and one would follow the other, and you had similar situations in countries like Germany and France. But that politics has very much fragmented recently. And I think the interesting fact is that that traditional economic right-left division where you had a of a right-wing party that was small state, low tax, pro-business, anti-regulation, and a left-wing party that was bigger state, higher taxes, more regulations, pro-union, pro-worker, but you've also now got a very different axis, which represents social values. And on one side you have the liberal international progressives, and on the other side you have the traditional nationalist authoritarian parties. And then over the top of that you've got populism.
And it's quite difficult to define populism, but it's generally defined as being a sort of philosophy of anti-pluralism where the populists see themselves as being the one true voice of the people. And you can see in America how Donald Trump is the paradigm example of that - both traditionally, economically right on the political axis, but also nationalist, authoritarian and traditional values. His success in the last elections has really brought that to the fore as a right-wing populist.
Drivers of political fragmentation
Lucy Lewis: I agree with this idea that we're seeing a sort of hollowing out of the centre ground and there's a rise of populist movements at both ends of the political spectrum - left and right are seeing an increase in influence at the expense of the centre ground. What are the things you think are driving that?
James Davies: I think there are two things that driving that, one of which is since the 2007/08 financial crash, we have had nearly 15-20 years now where we've had low economic growth, or zero economic growth in countries like the UK, and at the same time, we've had significantly rising inequality, particularly inequality of wealth.
And I think also you have the various drivers of change, which we've talked about on this podcast a lot - technological change, demographic change - and you have people who feel the world is leaving them behind. It's getting more and more difficult for them and they're disillusioned and disenchanted by political parties that have been governing those countries who have either been unable or unwilling to tackle these underlying challenges and therefore they've perhaps unsurprisingly looked for something different. And we see that not only with the rise of extremes and populism but also with the struggles of incumbents.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, and one of the ways we've seen that play out in the UK and the US particularly, is a focus on immigration. But of course, often that's just entwined with other concerns, like the ones you talk about - concerns about the economy, for example, people feeling that they're getting poorer. But there are other things aren't there, there's broader social and cultural shifts such as greater diversity in societies and the influence of social networking platforms as a space for political discussion and unfortunately, we've also seen that fuels misinformation and disinformation.
The other thing I think is worth keeping an eye on is in nearly half of those countries I've talked about having elections, they have a population of at least half Gen Z or Millennials and there's a sort of question about what impact that will have as we look to the future. And if you look to Europe as an example, there's been more support for the far-right parties from younger voters than you might have expected in previous generations. That sort of feels like a changing shift, perhaps driven by some of the ways that social media platforms have become a bit of a voice for elections. But the net result of all of those things, in my view, is that we've ended up with uncertainty for business. Business is in a position of needing to try to anticipate and prepare for potentially quite significant, rapid legislative change, but that's proving much more difficult to do. I don't know if you have any thoughts around that.
James Davies: Going back to what I was saying about the sort of different political axes and populism can over pin those axes – I think it's wrong to assume that all populists and right-wing populists are necessarily going to have similar policies when it comes to regulating work and business. I absolutely agree with you that a common feature of populism is an anti-immigration stance and probably an anti-globalisation stance and obviously that has quite a big impact for businesses. Populists don't say a great deal about their policies towards employment regulation and work. I think that's perhaps not that surprising because they are trying to ensure that they appeal to disenchanted voters often of whom are the people that benefit most from those workers’ rights. But if you do look carefully at the manifestos of some of the European populist parties, they are not universally parties of deregulation, of the economic traditional right. Increasing minimum wage is a feature that you see regularly, regulating irregular workers is another feature that you often see in the populist right’s manifestos. So I think it's difficult to say how an increase in populism will pan out across the world. Of course, Trump, who has the economic right as well as the social right, has promised significant deregulation of work.
I wrote a report in 2019, looking at the correlation between populism and employment law, looking both at left and right-wing populism, and I concluded at end of that that there was no clear correlation between populist parties and their approach to regulating work.
For those with responsibility for international businesses, looking at Donald Trump's triumph for the US elections, I do think the one thing that people need to keep a particular eye on is the attempts he has to deter organisations from promoting their DE&I strategies because for American-based multinationals, that is likely to extend beyond the States in its implications. So do keep an eye on what's happening there.
Going back to immigration I think it's interesting because, traditionally, being strict on immigration has been something we've seen from right-wing parties and populist parties, but I think increasingly we see even liberal centre-left parties adopt a much stricter line on immigration, I think they perhaps feel they need to, for electoral purposes. One of the countries I think is particularly interesting is Denmark, because they have a progressive, liberal, centre-left government, but one that has been very strict on immigration. And I think it's interesting that of the 15 major Western European countries, only two (the other one is Ireland) have negligible support for far-right populists. And I think it's perhaps not coincidental that the Danish centre-left's strict approach to immigration has reduced the popularity of far-right populists in that country.
The implications of political shifts in power for employment policy and regulation
Lucy Lewis: That's really interesting. I guess one of the things you can predict is that when you have a new government, a change of government, like in the UK, like in the US, that you tend to have a period of new regulation or perhaps reversing, withdrawing legislation that's been introduced by their predecessors. So, although the White House took some steps to Biden-proof their agenda, there are some changes that we might expect to see from Trump. So we might expect to see changes to DE&I, we might expect to see changes to collective rights, perhaps some changes to the stricter employment classification that had been brought in. And obviously the same is in the UK where we've got a new government, we've seen the Employment Rights Bill. So that's got a swathe of apparently employee friendly measures with focus on work-life balance, pay transparency, greater employee voice - David will come and talk about those changes. I don't know if you've got anything you want to add to what James has been saying, David, about how we can anticipate or what we should be thinking about looking out for?
David Hopper: Absolutely, because post-election upheaval really can be quite difficult for businesses. Here in the UK, for example, we've recently had the publication of a 158-page Employment Rights Bill, as you alluded to there, Lucy, which will in turn require ten sets of further regulations to make it fully effective. Although many parts of it were trailed before the election, it means that we face around two years ahead of uncertainty as the government first consults and then legislates on how to move the UK away from a model it sees as a “race to the bottom” based on low pay, low standards and insecurity of workers - such as by banning what it sees as unscrupulous practices like ‘fire and rehire’ and the use of exploitative zero-hours contracts, as well as introducing significant ‘day one’ employment rights, such as immediate protection for all employees from being unfairly dismissed.
I think the exception to the uncertainty in the form of more immediate reforms is also a good example of a new government reversing its predecessor’s policies, as you alluded to that Trump might do in the United States in the months ahead, for example. Whereas the last Conservative government invested significant time in recent years in passing the Trade Union Act 2016 and then the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) legislation in 2023, the new government is moving ahead without any further consultation to repeal the latter in full and to repeal most of the first legislation.
Meanwhile, if we look across the Atlantic, the outcome of the US election means that we're like to see a marked reversal from the current administration's self-proclaimed stance of being the most pro-union in American history, with further appointees by Trump to bodies such as the NLRB - so that's the National Labour Relations Board - which is likely to lead to a rolling back of union protections during organising campaigns in the United States.
And just as one other comment on this look across the Atlantic, it was quite notable when I was at a conference in the US over the summer actually, how significantly people thought the outcome of the election would be in a way that as a practitioner here in the UK, absolutely we could expect changes to legislation, but we wouldn't really expect case law to be developing based on the outcome of a presidential election or our equivalent, a general election here in the UK. That was really quite marked when I was over there in the summer, just how significant people thought that was going be in particular.
Back to the UK though, we've also seen a budget, so another sign of a new government, we've seen the new Labour budget include a substantial rise in payroll taxes to be paid by businesses at the same time, as James alluded to, changes to minimum wages, for example. While in the short term, these measures might be intended to stabilise public finances and, as Labour would put it, to ‘make work pay’, I think they do also raise some really interesting questions about whether, in the longer-term, businesses are also going to now need to look increasingly at how they invest in capital, for example if they're looking to move away from a more labour-intensive operating model dependent on what they would see at the moment as relatively low paid workers.
Global trends in employment regulation
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, it's interesting because although there is this degree of uncertainty, it does seem that there's trends that you can pick up on. Both of you have mentioned pay, although I know that Trump was sort of refusing to answer directly questions on minimum wage equivalent pay in the US, so we'll wait to see what happens there. James, I don't know if you have any thoughts on other things, if you're in an HR or legal role, global role, you should be looking out for in terms of trends in regulation.
James Davies: Well, I think it's increasingly important, particularly if you've got a sort of responsibility that covers more than one country to be keeping a close eye on the changing politics and what that's likely to mean. I think you have regulation, which you've talked about. You’ll see a global trend, this features even from the populist parties to, as I said, increase protection for irregular workers, family friendly rights are something that you're seeing greater attention given to across the world. And for me, probably the most significant is going to be the approach various countries adopt towards regulating AI in the workforce - whether it's disrupting jobs, it's AI safety and increasing use of AI in the workplace. Different political approaches to regulating AI are going to be very, very important and I think that's something that organisations need to keep a particular close eye on as politics fragments.
David Hopper: And perhaps just to jump here on the idea of trends as well, because there's a really interesting trend to consider from a collective action point of view of how workers are banding together. So, the 2024 elections so far this year have significantly impacted the dynamic between unions and employers. On the one hand, we're seeing a political trend to support greater collective rights and union power, in part based on a mentality of workers wanting to take, or even take back, more control over their lives. But on the other hand, we're seeing a global trend of declining union membership which has significant implications for workers being able to collectively bargain, for example.
It's notable that the new Labour government here in the UK is proposing to give unions three things they have long campaigned for: a legal right to access workplaces, more union-friendly rules on securing statutory recognition and less restrictive rules on industrial action. But I think the fundamental question is this: will the unions in fact be able to capitalise on these reforms? For example, are employees not currently joining unions because they don't know about them, or might it be that unions aren't offering an attractive value proposition to justify the monthly membership fees? And even if a union could secure recognition to conduct, say pay bargaining with the support of just 2% membership in a proposed bargaining unit, which is now being floated as a possibility by the UK government, is it really likely that the union will then actually have sufficient leverage and power to be able to meaningfully sit down at the bargaining table and secure the reforms they're looking for, or to call meaningful industrial action to disrupt the employer in response if they don't get what they're calling for?
So I think my own view is that statutory protections are going to be frankly as important as anything that organised labour can do. We just have to look at what's being rolled out for platform workers in the EU at the moment, and I think that the concept of legislating is actually going to remain more powerful than simply collective bargaining. I think, whilst it's notable that, for example, the European Union is still trying to drive up levels of union membership with reforms such as in the Adequate Minimum Wage Directive, with an impetus for governments to try increase and promote collective bargaining to cover 80% of the workforce, I think ultimately legislation is going to remain more effective than direct action by workers in their organised groupings.
Collective rights vs. individual rights
Lucy Lewis: That's just the perfect segue into wanting to talk a little bit more about collective rights because obviously a lot of what we've been talking about in terms of identifying trends with James has been on individual rights and it's really interesting your views on the value of those. But it is clear that lots of governments do want to create a more supportive environment for trade unions, they see that strengthening the influence of unions is a way of addressing that “power imbalance” and that sort of “employment deal” that we've been talking about. You've talked a little bit about how that's happening in the UK, and I'm interested in any more thoughts you might have about that.
David Hopper: Sure, I think counterintuitively a lot depends on the extent to which unions actually need members in workplaces in order to be effective organisations. If they do, not only to survive financially but to have an influence in the world of work, we should expect to see them focusing on meaningfully engaging their own memberships and workforces more widely, such as by capitalising on the introduction of new reforms. So, for example, in the UK, the introduction of new ‘Union Equality Representatives’ which the Labour government has promised will be there to promote equality and to be consulted on equality issues in the workplace as they come up, or capitalising on the European level reforms I mentioned a moment ago. Equally though, it's also possible that unions bizarrely don't actually need significant membership in order to have a significant role in society. So while at the one end of the spectrum you can have unions with potentially rather disengaged workforces or disengaged members - for example, here in the UK, we had a General Secretary of one of our biggest unions elected off just 3.8% of the votes of members - you can actually have unions being very powerful in society, even without strong, engaged workforces. And that, I think, largely comes about from what's possible in terms of something we call sectoral collective bargaining. So this is something where, there's a phenomenon in many European countries, where you'll have relatively low union membership rates, but very high levels of sectoral bargaining and significant power of the unions within society. If you look at a country like France, they have very low union membership levels but the idea that unions don't have power in France, I think would be very far wide off the mark.
And if we bring it home back to the UK, I think this idea of sectoral bargaining, which has been out of fashion for quite a number of years now here in the UK, it's not just a theoretical possibility - we're going to see this happening again. So the Employment Rights Bill itself includes the reintroduction of sectoral arrangements, for example for school support staff and workers in the adult social care sector, with the potential appointment of people to help set wages in the UK off the back of an appointment by a union following a request made to it by a minister with the only consultation required being that of the Trade Union Congress. So I think it really is going to turn on to what extent unions need that engaged workforce and that engaged membership to succeed or whether, in effect, structures are put in place which essentially bypass that requirement. That's not to say that unions won't obviously also want to recruit members, but they may actually be able to play a very significant role even if they don't crack this issue of increasing their actual membership levels.
How employers can navigate increasing regulatory uncertainty and complexity
Lucy Lewis: That's a really interesting way of looking at it - influence without membership - really interesting to see how it pans out. Trying to bring all this together a bit and asking, where does it leave employers, because lots of our listeners are working in legal or HR teams in big multi-national organisations and we've got this growing complexity all the time, it's becoming more and more challenging. It reminds me of a conversation I had on one of the earliest podcasts I did which was with Professor Ian Goldin, and he talked a bit about this growing sense of anxiety - people being anxious about AI, or the climate, or finance - with all that anxiety comes more rules and regulations to try and address it, essentially we just get more and more law.
But these elections and some of the things we've been talking about, and James what you were talking about in terms of the unpredictability of populist politics, it feels a bit like we're moving away from global harmonisation and moving more towards a sort of multi-system world where different countries will have different rules, different laws. And for global organisations keeping on top of all that, it's becoming an increasingly challenging but super important task. There are lots of areas where laws are diverging - take data privacy or potentially, with Trump in the White House, approaches to DE&I may be something that we see a significant diversion on. So if you're a business leader, from a future preparedness point of view, you've somehow got to build organisational resilience to try and keep ahead of all of this - how do you go about doing that?
James Davies: It's difficult and I totally agree with you, it's getting more difficult as it gets more fragmented. I mean Brexit being an example, the sort of nationalist drive results in a move away from any harmonisation of global employment terms. However, I think for businesses, they want the simplicity of having one set of rules to comply with and I think we saw with data privacy that you mentioned, with GDPR effectively becoming the global base from which organisations operated, even if in a particular jurisdiction the rules might be less strict. And I think we may well see that with the EU AI Act and whether or not other countries have different rules, if that will gradually become the base from which organisations seek to operate. I think you've got the regulations, but for global businesses approaches to migration are obviously critically important - you need to be able to employ people, find the right people, and what may be perceived as overly strict approaches to migration may influence where you work and where you put your people. And I think as we mentioned previously, keep an eye on Donald Trump's approach to DE&I and, America being America, you may well find that you need to pay closer attention to the cross-border implications of what's happening in America.
But I totally agree, it's difficult and you know, one fears that this fragmentation will lead to much greater social divisions which employers are going to have to face. I've talked quite a bit about right-wing populism which is sort of flavour of the of the month with Trump's triumph and in Western Europe at the moment, but I think employers need to keep an eye on all forms of fragmentation of politics. We see the rise of the far-left in France getting more votes than were expected at the last legislative elections, you get far-right libertarian approaches like we see in Argentina. I wrote another report in 2019 about green politics, the rise of green politics and what it would mean for employment law. Now, ever since I wrote that, green politics seems to have declined as a force around the world. But I do think that with every climate catastrophe we see, that there is every possibility that in the years ahead we will see a resurgence in green politics. And that's going to add another complication because green parties tend to be very pro- collective bargaining, pro-union and pro-regulation. So it's all very complicated, but it needs to be higher up international businesses agenda.
Managing workplace divisions and conflict
Lucy Lewis: I agree with you that this sense of politically diverse views is starting to spill over into the workplace, it's becoming a challenging thing manage - the workplace is becoming more diverse, more intergenerational, more international. One of the things that feels counterintuitive is that that doesn't create greater harmony, it creates disharmony. I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but there's some really staggering figures from last year's Edelman Trust barometer that found that only 20% of people would be willing to work alongside somebody that disagrees with their point of view, you know, it's really surprising. And we're finding ourselves in a position where managing conflict in the workplace is becoming a strategic priority. You've got to have leaders that can be skilled, trained to be able to manage conflict in work as a result of all this political unease spilling out into the workplace. David, I don't know if you have thoughts on any of this.
David Hopper: Absolutely, because this is just another area where unions see an opportunity to exert and frankly grow their influence. Employee expectations have been evolving over a number of years now and this was absolutely accelerated by the pandemic. And one really important aspect of this is employee voice. Fundamentally, employees want to be heard - that's the substance of what you were just getting at there, Lucy. And where there is discord or disagreement, this can present real challenges for some businesses. As James touched on earlier, discontent in the workforce isn't just focused on the traditional aspects of pay and working conditions anymore. It also encompasses much wider issues, much trickier issues, which often stray into seeking to influence even how organisations are making their underlying decisions. Managed well, proactively building effective workplace employee voice mechanisms, such as staff councils or works councils, can absolutely boost organisational performance and innovation by creating a really trusted environment that allows the effective management of employee concerns. As I see it, employers that embrace this approach and do this well can absolutely minimise the exposure to union influence, particularly in a current climate where there are such strong political drivers to create a more supportive environment for unions coming down the tracks.
James Davies: Picking up on these social divisions, Lucy, which I think are a really an increasing challenge for business, for employers, I think one interesting aspect is the extent to which these divisions correlate by gender or age. In the UK, older people vote Conservative, younger people vote Labour; younger people tend to have more progressive attitudes to various social issues, older people tend to have more traditional conservative attitudes, although as you said earlier, it's interesting in much of Western Europe how many younger people are voting for the far-right populists. But it's younger men, not younger women, generally, that are voting for the populists. And I think that illustrates an increasing divide we keep reading about between where values break by gender. And there was much talk in the States about how that was going to pan out and in the end, I don't think it was quite as pronounced as had been predicted but I think that's another issue that we need to keep an eye on - the extent to which social values are breaking by gender.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, James. I thought David made a really interesting point about trust and needing to build a trusted environment - that being a key way through all this. Because that's obviously something we've talked about quite a lot on this podcast and again, the Edelman Trust Barometer has found for a number of years that employees see business as the most trusted institution in preference to sort of traditional institutions like government. And in the context of everything that we've spoken about today, it feels like that presents an opportunity through what is a very difficult and complex pathway, but if you can have a focus on promoting good employee support, it feels like that may be a way to address some of this uncertainty and some of this complexity. But of course, time will tell and all those things are easier said than done.
Priority actions for employers
Before we finish the conversation, everyone listening will know that there's a question that I ask all our podcast guests. So, I'm going to ask you both the question: given everything we've talked about today, what do you think are the two priority actions for employers, for HR, for legal teams to take now to prepare and build organisational resilience in the year ahead? As there's two of you, I'm going to let you have one each.
James Davies: Well, we've talked a lot about employers needing to keep a careful eye on the implications of political change, but for me, it's the impact of AI and automation that's the most significant factor that organisations need to develop a clear strategy for in order to remain resilient. And from an employer's perspective, a strategy around the potential job displacement, a strategy over new skills and a strategy in ensuring that AI in the workplace is brought in in a way that engenders trust and is brought in in a fair, safe and lawful way.
David Hopper: I'd say that the bottom line is your employees' voices are going to be expressed, come what may, one way or another, whether when in a negative form in the form of disgruntlement leading to staff turnover or potentially even industrial action, or when positive with staff really wanting to help shape a business's overall strategic direction. Given that, my best advice would be for employers to adopt a former president’s - we've heard a lot about the new president - but a former president's foreign policy doctrine, which was Obama's of frankly, “Don't do stupid sh*t”, and proactively enable employees to be heard and their voice to be heard so that, bluntly, a trade union doesn't have the opportunity to try and provide that mechanism and to do so by getting in between you and your own stuff.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you both, and thanks David because that's a very good piece of advice to finish on. It's been a fascinating conversation. I've been Lucy Lewis and you've been listening to Lewis Silkin's Future of Work ‘In Conversation…’ podcast. To listen to more conversations like this one, subscribe on your usual channels and I look forward to your company again next month where I'll be reflecting on some of the key themes that have emerged from all our conversations on the Future of Work Hub podcast this year.
If you'd like to be part of the Future of Work Hub community, please go to our website www.futureofworkhub.info and get in touch with us. We'd love to hear how you're navigating these issues. But until next time, goodbye.