Archive for the ‘Family Friendly’ Category
By Emma - Monday, October 6th, 2008
In a recent case about time off for dependants the Employment Appeal Tribunal has given some guidance on how the words ”unexpected” and “necessary” in s57A (1) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 should be interpreted.
In the case an employee had discovered on 8 December that her childminder would not be able to look after her children on 22 December. She tried very hard to put in place alternative care arrangements but was unable to do so. She therefore asked her employer if she could take the day off as dependants’ leave. Her request was declined and when she took the day off anyway she was given a verbal warning for so doing.
The employee then brought a claim for being subjected to a detriment for exercising her right to dependants’ leave. The Employment Tribunal upheld her claim and the Employer appealed.
The EAT held, rejecting the appeal, that “unexpected” was an ordinary word when applied to the facts of each case and should not be supplemented by words such as “sudden” or “in emergency”. It also held that the passing of time between the discovery of the need to make alternative arrangements and the taking of time off was to be considered in the context of the word “necessary”.
Posted in Family Friendly | No comments »
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By Nicky - Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
This month would appear to be the month for changes in employment law.
I am sure you are all aware that as of today, the minimum wage has increased to the following: -
- Workers aged 22 years and above are now to receive a minimum wage of £5.73 per hour,
- A development rate of £4.77 per hour is to be paid to workers aged 18-21 (inclusive)
- Workers under 18 years of age and no longer of compulsory school age receive the rate of £3.53 per hour
Secondly as of today the legislation concerning the displaying of employer liability insurance certificates has been changed. As I am sure you are aware, employers are legally obliged to display at least one copy of this certificate at each place of business where employees work. It is now satisfactory for this certificate to be available in an electronic form provided that each employee has access to it in that form. For more information please click here.
A third change impacts on maternity legislation. Women expecting babies after the 5 October will be entitled to the same terms and conditions of employment when they are on additional maternity leave as when they are on ordinary maternity leave.
A fourth change takes effect as of the 27 October 2008. The Fixed Term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable) Treatment Regulations will be amended to enable agency workers employed under fixed term contracts of less than 3 months to be entitled to Statutory Sick Pay. For the draft Regulations please click here.
The fifth and final change comes into force on 27 October 2008 and creates a benefit called Employment and Support Allowance which will effectively combine Incapacity Benefit and Income Support for new applicants claiming incapacity benefit. For more information please click here.
In a nutshell, these are the main changes coming into effect this month, which you need to be aware of and, if necessary, ensure provisions within your business are made to take account of them!!!
Posted in Family Friendly, Health and Safety, Maternity, National Minimum Wage, Sick Pay, Uncategorized | No comments »
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By Nicky - Thursday, September 4th, 2008
A recent article in Personnel Today has highlighted that employees are unaware of their rights to request flexible working.
Flexible Working was initially introduced to assist employees with caring commitments towards young children (under the age of six years) and children who were disabled (under the age of 18 years). It has now been recognised that employees often have other caring commitments, in particular caring for their parents and relatives. The law now recognises this and the Work and Families Act 2006 has widened the scope to enable flexible working requests to be made by employees who care for adults.
I would expect that there are many employee’s out there who are struggling to work full time and meet their caring obligations unaware that there are statutory provisions that may assist in making their lives a little less hectic.
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By Emma - Monday, September 1st, 2008
You may remember that after announcing a decision to extend the right to flexible working to parents of older children in November 2007 the government commissioned Imelda Walsh, Sainsbury’s HR Director, to carry out a review of flexible working which reported in May this year. The government has now launched a consultation on flexible working following on from the recommendations made by Ms Walsh in her report. Her principal recommendation that the right to request flexible working should be extended to parents of children of 16 and under has been accepted and the consultation relates primarily to how to make the process simpler for businesses and how to raise awareness of the right to employees and employers. The consultation closes on 18 November 2008.
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By Philip - Monday, May 19th, 2008
Last week was quite a busy week for news - what with natural disasters in China and Burma, the 10p tax u turn and a speech setting out the legislative intentions of the government.
One piece of news that may have been overlooked was the news that parents of children up to the age of 16 will have the right to request flexible working.
The BERR press release is here Some factoids which may be of interest:
- The changes will be introduced in one go.
- Small businesses have a better run rate at accepting requests than big business, no doubt because small business are inherently more flexible and have to have the ability to make changes quickly and without fuss.
- 91% of requests were granted. (that is a higher run rate than I expected)
- 45% of succesful requestees (is there such a word?) were men.
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By Sarah - Friday, November 9th, 2007
As reported on Wednesday by Liam the Queen’s speech contained a number of proposals for employment law. One of these was that the Government promised to bring forward proposals to help people achieve a better balance between work and family life.
Imelda Walsh, HR Director at Sainsburys, has been tasked by the Government to review how the current right to request to work flexibly can be extended and she will lead the independent review on this issue. The Government’s plan is to extend the right to those with children up to the age of 17. The review is set to report back in the spring of 2008 and then there will formal consultation on the issue. Watch this space for more updates on this and other employment law topics.
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By Sarah - Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
The BBC have today reported that mothers are finding it difficult to get a job with sufficient flexiblity when they want to return to work. You can read the full story here.
About 90% of mothers surveyed have difficulty, so the survey claims, in getting work flexibly. The results are not suprising given the source of the survey but a little suprising from a legal angle given the potential for a discrimination claim and the extension of the right to request flexible working.
Having said that we have seen a number of cases recently from both sides of the fence on flexible working. One where an employer had explored numerous options and the employee was still unhappy and another where an employee was having the best parts of her job given to a man on her return from maternity leave when she wanted to come back part-time. Food for thought for employers out there?
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By Liam - Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
The department for Communities and Local Government, DES, DTI, DWP and the Ministry of Justice have compiled a joint consultation document to invite comments regarding a complete overhaul of the existing equal opportunities/anti discrimination legislation. The consultation paper can be found here and includes instructions as to how to have your say!
The consultation paper was issued today and responses must be submitted by 4 September 2007.
On the subject of promoting equal opportunities, PJH Law offer an e-learning product designed to educate employees as to their responsibilities with regard to equal opportunities with a view to minimising risk to employers and promoting a pleasant and productive working environment for all workers. A free trial of Dignity at Work is now available. Contact Liam - liam@pjhlaw.co.uk or 0870 350 5805 for further details.
Posted in Age Discrimination, Disability Discrimination, Family Friendly, Maternity, Religion or Belief Discrimination, Sex/Race Discrimination | No comments »
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By Philip - Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
At PJH Law we welcome feedback on what we are getting right and what we are getting wrong. We send feedback forms out after each case. We then act on the feedback.
On Monday Liam wrote a post outlining the benefits that out of work activities can have have on performance at work. He used as an example his love of sailing and described how the skills and experience he obtains from sailing can be deployed to PJH law’s advantage to great effect.
In so doing he illustrated the productivity benefits for employers in ensuring employees have a work/life balance. Health in mind and body and all that.
We were therefore surprised and disappointed to have a comment recorded in the comments box by a Marcin Tustin to the effect that Liam’s post was “facile” and long winded. This I thought was unjustified so through the comments box we invited Marcin to do a guest post on this blog illustrating how a hobby of his helps him in his work or study so that we could benefit from Marcin’s ability to use the English language to concise and brilliant effect. Marcin declined.
Obviously there are people out there who like to criticise but then cannot carry through the criticism by showing us how we could do better. To those people, of which we believe Marcin is one, we thought you might enjoy the picture at the top as it should remind you of your attitude in life “All mouth and no trousers.”
Update: The picture used above was commissioned by Christian Aid to highlight the West’s lack of action on Debt relief to Africa, a far more important topic than a spat between bloggers.
Posted in About us, Family Friendly | 9 comments »
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By Liam - Monday, June 4th, 2007
With the recent changes in family friendly legislation, a lot has been said lately about work life balance. Some employees agree that a good balance between work life and home life can aid productivity at work. Some activities in which employees are involved outside of work can benefit their work.
For example, I do a lot of competitive dinghy racing outside of work. Many of the skills necessary to do this are transferable and benefit my work as a Solicitor. For example, last summer I participated, along with about 50 other crews from England and Italy, in the Laser 4000 European Championships which were held on Lake Garda in Italy.
Before the event took place the first problem to be solved was getting a boat and two man crew from Peterborough to Italy. It is possible to drive, but this takes about 24 hours of non-stop travel, so in reality a good couple of days driving. Not fun. People can fly (providing they enlist the assistance of a 747), although still have to get from the airport in a foreign country, with a language barrier, to the event site about 100km away. Is there public transport from the airport? Can one hire a car? As for the boat, you can’t take a performance racing dinghy on a plane. You can’t sail one from England to Italy. Shipping has to be arranged. This involves getting the boat to a shipping agent, allowing time for them to get the boat on a big boat (of the P&O variety) and by road through France to Italy in time for the event. Accommodation is also needed for a 4 day event and pre-event familiarisation with the venue. Solving all these problems takes considerable problem solving and organisation skills. It would be somewhat embarrassing to arrive to compete and find the boat, a rather fundamental bit of kit for such an event, had not turned up.
Similarly, employment Tribunals require organisational and problem solving skills. One knows where one is at the start of the matter - with a client spitting bricks at their ex-employer (or ex-employee depending on which side one is acting) and wanting to end up with judgment in their favour at Tribunal. As a Solicitor, one has to plan how to progress the case from taking instructions to a successful resolution. What happened? What’s our statement of case/defence? What evidence is available? How can we get evidence we need from an uncooperative opponent? What witnesses will be needed? Will they want to come to court? How can we get them to court? All these matters need to be considered and planned in the same way as getting the boat and crew from England to Italy.
Having done the planning and successfully arrived at the Lake Garda (or the Tribunal) with the boat, crew, accommodation, spare kit etc. (or the Tribunal with bundles, statements and witnesses) one has to be able to think on one’s feet and adapt to new facts or unexpected information.
Lake Garda starts off as a wide lake surrounded by relatively flat terrain at the South end. Moving about 60km further north (yes lake Garda is big - takes an hour to drive from end to end) the lake becomes far narrower with steep cliffs. This creates a funnelling effect where lots of wind is forced through a narrow gap in the cliffs which makes the wind increase in strength and behave abnormally. The funnelling forces the wind to bend. In open water, wind doesn’t normally do this. In the first couple of races of the event, we had some shocking results. We hadn’t accounted for this phenomenon. There were more boats ahead of us than behind us. This was not the plan! A bit of quick thinking, analysing other boats and trial and error enabled to identify the problem, factor it in to our earlier careful planning and climb up the results, culminating with a win in the last race of the event.
Similarly, at Tribunal the unexpected can, and quite often does happen. Witnesses don’t say what one wanted, new evidence gets pulled out of a hat or the Tribunal Chairman comes at things from an unexpected angle. All these require rapid re-assessment of information and quick thinking to achieve a satisfactory outcome. Allowing employees time to have a life outside of work allows employees to develop skills that can be of benefit to employers in the workplace.
Posted in Family Friendly | 3 comments »
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