Workers are being “cheated” out of holiday pay worth £2 billion as some employers deliberately deny holiday requests, according to a new report.

The TUC said its research suggested that 1.1 million employees did not take any of the paid holiday they were entitled to last year.

The main reasons included a culture where workers feared asking for paid time off could lead to them being treated unfavourably, staff struggling with unrealistic workloads that did not allow time to take leave, as well as requests being turned down, said the TUC.

The report, published to mark the beginning of the TUC’s annual Congress on Sunday, said the “missing weeks” of holiday paid added up to £1,800 per affected employee.

The research indicated that black and minority ethnic (BME) staff were hardest hit, with 6% not getting any paid holiday last year, compared to 4% of white employees.

The jobs with the highest numbers of staff losing out were waiters and waitresses (59,000), care workers and home carers (55,000), and kitchen and catering assistants (50,000), showing that low paid workers were most at risk of losing paid holiday entitlement, said the report.

The TUC added that millions of workers were missing out on many other basic employment rights due to a lack of enforcement.

The union organisation called for effective enforcement of employment rights to help workers, as well as decent employers who were being “undercut” by those ignoring their legal duties.

The TUC is supporting Labour’s plans for a Fair Work Agency and has accused the previous Conservative government of allowing bad employers to cheat staff out of basic workplace rights.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “We all deserve a break from work to spend time off with our friends and family, but more than a million working people have been deprived of any of the paid leave they are due, and hundreds of thousands more have been denied basic rights like being paid the minimum wage.

“The Conservative government sat back and let bad employers cheat their staff out of their basic workplace rights.

“Tory ministers were more concerned about stopping people getting what they were due by introducing anti-union measures, than funding enforcement bodies properly.

“Now it’s time to reset the dial and to end the Tories’ race to the bottom.

“This week at Congress we will be debating how we can drive up standards at work. These shocking findings show why we need the Employment Rights Bill and the Fair Work Agency.”