Yesterday Unite union members won a groundbreaking employment appeal tribunal which means all UK employers now need to include overtime when calculating workers’ holiday pay. If you’re contracted to work 20 hours per week, at the moment you’ll get 20 hours’ holiday pay for each week you’re on holiday – even if you regularly work 15 extra hours of overtime. Because of this ruling your employer will now have to pay you 35 hours’ weekly holiday pay to reflect the reality of your working hours, rather than what it says in your contract. It effectively means employees working lots of overtime aren’t penalised with a temporary pay cut for taking paid leave.

Unite hails this victory as a positive development for Britain’s increasingly skint workforce. This is something you probably won’t have heard if you’ve been following the reaction of the business lobby, which has been proffering a rather more apocalyptic version of events. “The holiday pay timebomb could have a hugely detrimental impact on businesses up and down the country. It is not an exaggeration to say that some small businesses could end up being wiped out,” thundered Simon Walker, director general of the IoD, which represents company bosses. That’s right, workers of the world: try to tip the scales in your favour in even the most modest of ways and you’ll invoke a disaster of biblical proportions: businesses WIPED OUT! The economy COLLAPSING! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!

Hmm. Or not. One of the key ways in which business representatives (or “unelected barons”, as I like to call them) are scaremongering about this result is by arguing that employers will have to backdate extra holiday pay to 1998, which is, remarkably, the year legislation was introduced to make holiday pay mandatory in the UK, merely 60 years after the original UN convention.

This isn’t true. As the claim was brought under the Wages Act of 1986, employees will only be able to get backdated holiday pay for the last three months. Businesses, small or otherwise, will be absolutely fine – just as they were when the original legislation was introduced in 1998, and when the minimum wage came into force in the same year.

The more likely upshot of this ruling is that it will poke significant holes in the bete noire of precarious employees everywhere: the zero-hours contract. No longer will employers be able to enjoy the benefits of full-time workers safe in the knowledge that they are entitled to nothing in return. Perhaps that is actually why Walker is so alarmed at the outcome of the tribunal and, more generally, perhaps unions securing victories like these for their members is why they’re monstered so frequently by the establishment. Imagine what businesses would have got away with – from asbestos on construction sites to child labour – if unions hadn’t come into being.

Still, it’s nice to see the government taking action so quickly and competently for once. Vince Cable has announced: “To properly understand the financial exposure employers face, we have set up a taskforce of representatives from government and business to discuss how we can limit the impact on business.” Very good. Of course I’m still waiting for the emergency taskforce the government is going to assemble to address the scandalous rise in food banks, the appalling treatment of disabled people by the Department for Work and Pensions, or the burgeoning housing crisis which sees thousands of people facing evictions. I expect an announcement to be made any day now.

See, perhaps there’s a lesson in all of this: perhaps the poor treatment of employees is a choice businesses make because the government lets them get away with it. Perhaps if we really want to hold employers to account we’ll have to do it ourselves. That sounds like a lot of work, but luckily there are organisations already doing that. They’re called unions, and we’d all be a lot poorer without them.