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Tags: The Employment Rights Bill
Categories: Employment Law
As we’re sure you’re aware, the new Employment Rights Bill is a biggie. When it is fully enacted, it’s likely to bring in the most significant changes for at least a generation. There’s been nothing like it since the major employment law reforms of 1998. Our blog in July looked at the background, probable reforms and their impacts.
Little in the bill actually comes into effect on the day it gets passed by Parliament in a few weeks’ time. Instead, the most significant changes will come in over time, often only after specific regulations has been published by the government, usually following consultation exercises. The bill is mostly silent on what the fine details of these will be, so at this point we can guess at how things will turn out in general terms, but cannot yet give you the full picture.
In the last few days, the government has launched several consultation exercises on these new regulations. We encourage you to read these consultation papers and contribute your views where you can.
Key changes to individual employee rights contained in the bill include:
Trade unions
Turning from individual rights to collective rights, the bill introduces a raft of new rules that will make it far easier for trade unions to gain workplace recognition, ballot for industrial action, take industrial action, access workplaces to encourage membership and raise funds.
Many of you who don’t currently recognise or work with a union can expect the possibility of a knock on the door. It will no longer be so easy to resist that knock.
Pay gap reporting
The current requirement for larger employers to calculate and publish their gender pay gap will be expanded to also cover ethnicity pay gaps and disability pay gaps. These new requirements will require a lot of additional data collection and analysis, made all the harder because many employers do not currently have good data on these aspects and the data will need to cover multiple ethnic groups and potentially multiple disability types, rather than just the simplicity of male versus female.
Government-funded enforcement of rights
Finally, the bill promises a single government-funded employment rights enforcement body, with sweeping powers to take enforcement action against employers in respect of individual employment rights without the employees themselves apparently needing to bring their own claims. This could be a really major change, since many less scrupulous employers benefit from ignoring certain employment rights safe in the knowledge that their individual employees are unlikely to want to risk suing them.
Back burner
Other promised employment law reforms appear to have been relegated to the back burner for now. This includes a review of TUPE and a ‘right to disconnect’, for which there will apparently be a consultation process, but it’s not clear whether this will result in specific employment rights or simply a code of practice.
In our next blogs we will explore some of these key areas in turn but in the meantime if you’re struggling to get to grips with what these changes may mean for your business, please get in touch
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