Rojgar Job News

There is a risk when you comment in any way critically on reports on workplace stress that you come across as some form of Victorian mill-owner, a keen believer in cold showers, beatings and the maintenance of staff morale through the periodic execution of slackers. Or maybe, as in the most recent Acas publication on the topic, there are genuinely things which could and should usefully have been said about responsibility for workplace stress and weren’t. The workplace policy document “Stress and anxiety at work: personal or cultural?” was issued earlier this month. Based on a survey of 2,000 employees it pings up a number of statistics which are not all they seem and it does not draw the conclusions from them which you might expect. So for starters, the key question is whether the 2,000 respondents to the survey felt “stressed or anxious” about work. A full 66% said that they did. Two thirds! What a searing indictment of industrial relations in the UK! But ...

If you Google that phrase you get any number of possible movie sources for it, but here in the height of the holiday season, I can offer you two more. First, back to the studio at BBC News Online where some staffer with time on his/her hands and a page to fill produced last week the surreally pointless headline “Scaffolding collapse: nobody trapped under rubble” and to bring the piece alive, put next to it a video clip of literally no-one being trapped in any way. Job done, I think. And then similarly to Acas for its newly re-issued guidance on Your First Job. This is clearly aimed at those fresh out of school or Uni, certificates burning a hole in their new pockets and off into the workplace for the first time. What are Acas’ key messages for this new generation? It’s not high-level stuff, in all honesty, and if people do come out of the UK educational system still needing this sort of thing then frankly we have altogether bigger problems than a shortage of STEM...

Not often that we make reference in this blog to other organisations’ events, but here is one which is definitely worth talking about, and not just because we are part of it. The Civil Mediation Council is running an event on the use of mediation as a proactive tool to resolve conflict in the workplace and the savings of time, cost and relationships which that can bring relative to a normal grievance process. Kindly hosted in Moorgate by the Bank of England, the program looks at this question from a range of different perspectives and will offer delegates substantial insight into the whys and wherefores of this process. We are delighted to be represented on this platform alongside high profile speakers from the Civil Service, Acas and the CIPD. I very much hope that you will be able to attend. I promise an interesting and thought-provoking session which will leave you with a new set of approaches to the effective conduct of grievances and disputes in your workplace. The booking de...

Earlier this month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission issued new guidance on sexual harassment and harassment at work. The guidance is very comprehensive, running to some 82 pages, but if you are responsible for drafting your company’s harassment policies or for handling such complaints in the workplace, you should still take a look at it to ensure that your policies and practices are in line with the EHRC’s recommendations. At the moment the guidance is non-statutory, which means that there is no direct legal sanction on employers if they don’t comply with it. Clearly, however, it is good practice for employers to do so and I refer only to “direct” sanction above because it would be very naïve not to expect material disregard for it not to be held against you on the margins in any Tribunal litigation. According to the EHRC’s website, the guidance is expected to become a statutory Code of Practice “in due course”. Presumably th...

An early contender for 2020’s Least Necessary Employment Law Award was issued last week, with a special commendation also in the Most Distasteful Details category. So all rise for the Parental Bereavement Regulations 2020, described by one author in 2017 as an “overt attempt to turn grief into political capital”. Actually it was me, [here], but since the finished product is basically as inept and unnecessary and pays as little regard to the realities of bereavement as the original proposal, the point remains good. From 6 April this year, a parent who suffers a stillbirth or loses a child aged 18 or under (parents of older children are just supposed to take it on the chin, I guess) is entitled to two weeks off work – not necessarily consecutively – at the lower of £151.20 per week or 90% of salary. There is a lot of grotesquely over-engineered detail in the Regulations around Week A and Week B and how to move and cancel your weeks off within the 56 wee...

When all this is over and the UK looks back to see what we learnt from the Coronavirus crisis, maybe somewhere on the list will be a point on making law by Twitter.  #askRishi on Friday evening was an extremely brave attempt on the Chancellor’s part to engage with the detailed issues arising from the Job Retention Scheme , but it does create some interesting questions for future judicial interpretation when what employers are relying on are essentially on-the-hoof announcements with the lifespan of a mayfly.  Next stop, law by Snapchat. Personally I would rather base my business decisions on, y’know, actual law , but pending that, there was some further help for employers in the revised Covid-19 Guidance issued on Saturday morning.  This contained some clarification, some further confusion and nothing at all about what the Government must surely know to be one of the key questions on all this, i.e. the interplay between furlough and holiday (but see below)....

There are four main moving parts to bringing people back to work, only two of which were mentioned by the Prime Minister in his speech last night. He made clear very properly the continued focus on health (particularly the R factor – the rate at which one person with the virus is likely to infect others) as the determinant of steps out of lockdown and that those steps would not be dictated by mere hope or (slightly less credibly) financial pressures. He could not say anything else. But before his words were even cold, commentators had seized on the tension between his suggestion that workers who cannot work from home (especially construction and manufacturing) should be “actively encouraged” to return to on the one hand, and his advice that they avoid public transport on the other. Walk or cycle if you can, he said brightly, surely aware that for the vast majority of commuters this suggestion is at best of academic interest and at worst, borderline insulting to their i...

Neatly timed to coincide with the beginning of the end of lockdown, ACAS has this week has issued some new thoughts on the conduct of disciplinary and grievance proceedings during the pandemic.  Can or should you really run these things without the physical meetings referred to in generations of prior ACAS guidance? In these respects, this new advice unfortunately asks many more questions than it answers.  “ The employer needs to decide… “, it says repeatedly, or “ The employer must consider… “.  I am not sure either that much is really added to the sum of human wisdom by the cautionary note that “ In cases that might result in dismissal, the employer must always act fairly to avoid unfair dismissal”. The new ACAS advice makes it clear that the existing law remains unchanged, as does its own formal Code of Practice,  but remember that that Code is just a gloss upon The Law.  All that says is that the employer sh...

Following on from the new Acas guidance on involvement in grievance and disciplinary meetings while on furlough comes the logical next question – where there are ongoing legal proceedings (we shall assume in the Employment Tribunal, but it could be anything), is an employee on furlough able to assist? Or will he thereby be deemed to be working for or providing services for his employer, neither of which he is allowed to do?  If you need one of your employees to prepare a witness statement, provide comments on a pleading (yours or the other side’s) or look out relevant documentation, will that require you to take him off furlough and potentially prejudice three weeks’ worth of your Job Retention Scheme support entitlement for him? Based on the Acas guidance (but bearing in mind that it is not law and may or may not have been written in conjunction with HMRC) the logical answer to this must obviously be that it all depends.  If you as the furloughed employ...