Business leaders may thunder about job cuts, but their threats could backfire: union membership is only growing

What a perverse act of defiance – two fingers up to government policy by a major company. Bidfood is one of the largest food distributors in the UK, with 26 depots supplying about 40,000 institutions and food service companies, including Manchester United, Subway and Five Guys. What’s more, it supplies NHS trusts, the army, prisons and schools and the royal household. Yet it chooses this moment to derecognise trade unions, abandoning a longstanding recognition of the GMB and Unite. This reflects the rumbling resistance to the government’s flagship working rights legislation that is now going through parliament.

The unions say that tearing up the recognition agreement came out of the blue: there had been no dispute at the company. Now the unions fear the company is doing it because it plans a P&O-style fire-and-rehire of its food delivery workers, reducing the terms of their contracts to pre-empt something that will be effectively banned when the new employment rights laws come into force.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist