In recent years there have been many employment law cases both in the UK and across Europe about what is “appropriate work attire”. The most high profile of these have been to do with an employee’s desire to express their religious beliefs through the wearing of headscarves or crucifixes at work. In Read more…
With the upcoming referendum now less than a month away (taking place on 23 June 2016), what are the potential implications for UK Employment Law of an exit from the EU and how much of the media coverage is fact or fiction? It is fair to say that there has Read more…
Not necessarily, according to the recent Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruling in Kelly v Covance Laboratories Ltd, which will be of interest to employers with an increasingly diverse workforce. Covance Laboratories Ltd (R) operated animal testing in their laboratories and had been subject to unwelcome attention from animal rights activists including Read more…
It is common for organisations with HR departments to heavily involve HR in disciplinary, grievance and redundancy processes. Indeed, one might say that is the whole point of having an HR department in the first place. To what extent though should the HR manager confine themselves to advice on procedure Read more…
In 2013, we saw the Employment Appeal Tribunal effectively re-write the statute book and change the way employers needed to approach collective redundancy consultation, by removing the need for redundancies to be at one establishment”. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has now given its Judgment and it looks like the law Read more…
To what extent can a Tribunal look into previous written warnings given to an employee when deciding whether a subsequent dismissal was fair? It is unusual to see the Court of Appeal (CA) overturn an Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decision which upheld the initial decision of the Tribunal, but this Read more…
The case of Lock and others v British Gas Trading Ltd has returned to an Employment Tribunal, which has ruled it necessary to add words to the Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTR) to make it compliant with the EU Working Time Directive. You may recall that the European Court of Read more…
Many managers and people working in HR will have grown used to the concept of age discrimination over the last ten years or so since regulations came into effect making it unlawful to discriminate in employment on the grounds of age. As with many changes in the law, when the Read more…
You may recall the introduction of “punitive fines” for employers who lose Employment Tribunal cases with “aggravating features” in April last year. What will undoubtedly be welcome news for employers now, however, is the fact that absolutely no awards have been made since the legislation took effect. That’s a period of nine Read more…
HR professionals will be familiar with the situation where new contracts of employment are sent out to employees which are never returned. This creates difficulties when the employer wants to rely on any changes in the new contract. The question then becomes: is the employee bound by the new terms? Read more…