The Department for Business and Trade has published a number of factsheets which set out what each policy or framework within the Employment Rights Bill aims to do and explains how it will work. The factsheets cover: • adult social care negotiating body • bereavement, paternity and unpaid parental leave • fair work agency •… >>
The Equality Hub has been replaced by the Office for Equality and Opportunity. The Office for Equality and Opportunity will cover the overall framework of equality legislation in the UK, including disability policy, ethnic disparities, gender equality and LGBT+ rights.
The Employment Rights Bill 2024, published on 10 October 2024, contains 28 measures hailed by the government as the ‘biggest upgrade to rights at work for a generation’. The measures, many of which were set out in the government’s Plan to make work pay and Manifesto, include: • provisions to end ‘exploitative’ zero-hours contracts and… >>
In Dowding v The Character Group Plc [2024] EAT 153 the employment tribunal dismissed the claimant’s whistleblowing unfair dismissal claim because it concluded that the claimant had not, in law, made protected disclosures, because the disclosures relied upon were not believed by him to have been made in the public interest (alternatively, if they were,… >>
An employment tribunal has ordered a police force to pay a former sergeant more than £1.1m for forcing her to quit when it withdrew permission to run a hobby business that helped her cope with work stress and PTSD. Hibbert v The Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, ET case number 3310944/2020.
In Tesco Stores Ltd v Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) [2024] UKSC 28, in a unanimous decision in which Lord Burrows and Lady Simler delivered the leading judgment, the Supreme Court agreed with the previous High Court decision and restored the injunction restraining Tesco from terminating employment contracts for the specific purpose… >>
In Torres v Apple (UK) Ltd, ET case number 2212766/2023, Apple defeated claims that it directly or indirectly discriminated against a female Spanish employee by ordering her to return to her London-based role as part of a post-pandemic policy, an employment tribunal has ruled. It also successfully defended claims of constructive unfair and wrongful dismissal.
The new Labour government has dropped legislation that gives workers the right to request a more predictable working pattern to allow them to pursue a stronger contractual right to the hours they usually work.
In Thandi v Next Retail Ltd (ET/1302019/2018) a group of retail workers has won a landmark equal pay case against high street fashion chain Next. The employment tribunal ruled that more than 3,500 sales consultants, mostly female, were right to claim that Next Retail Ltd had broken the law by paying them a lower basic… >>