Ask an Ealing Expert
More developments in Employment Law from our Ealing expert, Louise Taft
Time off for training
Government proposals likely to become law will require employers to consider a request from their employees for time off for training. It is likely that this will only apply to employees who have been working for 6 months or more.
The Government has recently launched a consultation on exactly how this will work but it is suggested that employers would have to consider requests fairly and would have to produce defined business reasons for refusing. It is expected that legislation would be in place by 2010.
Inflexible working?
A recent survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has found that 69% of employers either never or only occasionally accept employees’ requests to work from home. As I detailed in a previous article, employees with children under the age of 6 or disabled children under the age of 18 have the right to request flexible working, which could include homeworking. This right is likely to be extended to parents of all children under the age of 18 shortly.
Employers routinely refusing requests may find themselves on the wrong side of Employment Tribunal claim. Defined business reasons need to be provided as to why an employee cannot work from home.
Equality bill
Details have been released of the proposed new Equality Bill designed to replace the current confused state of the law with regard to discrimination. The main aim of the Bill is to put discrimination legislation into plain English and to consolidate the existing position.
You might think this is interesting only to employment lawyers but there are some interesting proposals including controversially reversing the present position outlawing positive discrimination. The proposal is that employers would be able to positively discriminate between two equally qualified candidates. So an employer faced with a white male dominated work force would be able to give preferential treatment to female or ethnic minority candidates if they were equally suitable as white men.
It is also proposed to make it unlawful to prevent employees discussing their pay, which it is thought might help to reduce the gender pay gap as women would be more likely to bring equal pay claims if they knew that their male colleagues were being paid more than them.
Age Discrimination is also likely to be extended into the provision of goods and services (i.e. shops and restaurants etc.). Currently age discrimination is only outlawed in the field of employment.
EU protection from agency workers
European Employment Ministers have negotiated new protection for agency and temporary workers. Once they have been with a single employer for 12 weeks they would have the same rights as permanent employees. It remains to be seen how the UK government would implement this in practice. As part of the same deal, the UK is to be allowed to keep its opt out from the Working Time Regulations. This allows employees to opt out of the 48 hour maximum working week if they wish to.
July 4, 2008
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