From October your employer must hand you a written statement about joining a union. There is no statement about the machine.

From 30 October this year, every employer in Britain has to give every worker a piece of paper. It says you have the right to join a trade union. It comes with your contract, at the start of the job, and again at intervals the regulations will set. Section 58 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 put it there, and the minister who took it through committee was blunt about why: until now there has been no general requirement for an employer to tell staff that the right exists at all.

I think that is a good law. People cannot use a right they have never been told about.

Which is the whole of my point this morning, because there is a second thing happening to workers that nobody has to tell them about either.

If a machine alone decides whether you get an interview, whether your shift pattern changes, whether your performance is scored down, you do have rights. They are real and they are in force. Where a decision carries legal or similarly significant effect and is made purely by automated means, with no meaningful human involvement, you are entitled to be told specific information about it, to put your side, and to ask for a person to look again.

Now hold those two things next to each other. One right arrives in your hand, in writing, on your first day, by law, from October. The other one you have to already know about, correctly guess that it applies to you, and then ask.

There is a worse problem underneath, and it is not the government's.

In March the Information Commissioner published what it found after talking to more than thirty employers about automated decisions in hiring. Most of them thought it unlikely they were making automated decisions at all. The regulator concluded that several of them were. It wrote to sixteen organisations it believed were letting machines decide about candidates, and they have agreed to change how they work.

Read that as a worker and it is bleak arithmetic. The right that protects you switches on at a line. Your employer decides whether that line has been crossed. And the regulator has established, from employers' own accounts, that a good number of employers do not know where the line is.

A right nobody has to tell you about, which depends on a judgement made by the person it protects you from, is not much of a right.

On 8 July in Westminster Hall, Neil Duncan-Jordan asked ministers for a duty on employers to disclose their use of AI and a right for the workforce to be consulted about it. He did not get it. On the same day, the government published a consultation on workplace monitoring technologies, which covers exactly this ground and proposes no immediate change to the law. It closes on 30 September.

So something is moving. I want to be fair about that, and I am not going to pretend the government is doing nothing when it is plainly doing something.

But I would say the same to any party that has held this brief in the last decade, because none of them has managed it. We are able to legislate a written statement about union membership, with a commencement date and secondary legislation and guidance due in September. We have not managed a written statement about the machine that reads your application. The first is a matter of paperwork. The second is a matter of whether the biggest change to how work is allocated in a generation happens where anyone can see it.

If you have applied for a job in Britain this year, you probably do not know whether a person read it. That is the thing I cannot get past.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report this morning, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.