Labour's Plans for Employment Law and Workers Rights
Alan Kitto
At a recent speech to the TUC Congress, Labour’s deputy Leader has said that within the first one hundred days of a Labour Government, we would see the following changes.
Introduce Day One Rights. There were no further details in the speech although Labour has said that unfair dismissal would become a day one right subject to exceptions for probationary periods. Currently, with a few exceptions, employees require two years of continuous service to be able to bring a claim for unfair dismissal. There’s been no mention as to whether employers will be able to choose the length of their probationary period, if they can, we suspect most will opt for a year or even two.
Extend Sick Pay to Workers (Not Just Employees). This is interesting given Labour have previously indicated that it intended to merge employee and worker status.
Ensure Worker’ Rights are Properly Enforced. Again, no detail but this could indicate changes to the Employment Tribunal system or even the introduction of a new enforcement body.
In addition to the above, mention was made of going trade unions a new legal right to access workplaces, a repeal of the recent legislation that limits the right to take industrial action and a simplification of the statutory trade union recognition process.
There’s an intention of introducing sector wide Fair Pay Agreements, likely starting with the social care sector and finally an and to ‘fire and re-hire’ although it’s hard to see how that might be achieved.
Many of these proposed changes will be very popular with the trace unions and employees/workers alike but, depending in the detail behind them, likely to unpopular with employers.
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