Employment Law and the Election 2024
As a business owner and consultant advising employers on employment law I was pleased to find that my professional body the CIPD has summarised the employment law promises from the three largest parties going into the election.
It got me thinking how much is at stake here. Looking just at the employment agenda’s there will be a lot of work to generate all of these laws and regulations, let alone the burden on employers to consult, write and implement the policies that accompany them. Not to mention the additional costs and burdens on the payroll and reduction of available working time from people within the business.
If you own and run a business like me, we should also be taking a close look at the proposed financial and business support strategies being promised before making up our minds how to vote.
CIPD Article
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that a general election will be held on 4 July. Here, we run through the main political parties’ positions on workplace reform.
This has been updated following the release of an updated version of Labour’s “Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People”.
Labour
- Day-one rights: Remove qualifying periods for basic rights like unfair dismissal, sick pay, and parental leave so they become day-one rights.
- Single status of “worker”: Remove current distinction between employees and workers so that all workers are afforded same basic rights and protections, eg sick pay, holiday pay, parental leave, protection against unfair dismissal, etc.
- Strengthen rights: Strengthen existing rights and protections, including for pregnant workers, whistle-blowers, workers made redundant, workers subject to TUPE processes and those making grievances; reinstate School Support Staff Negotiating Body; encourage employers to sign up to “Dying to work” charter to support workers with a terminal illness.
- Self-employment: Be given a right to a written contract.
- Raise wages for workers: Remove age bandings used in current system; reform role of the Low Pay Commission including requiring them to take cost of living into consideration when recommending rates; ensure travel time in sectors with multiple working sites is paid; act on ‘sleep over’ hours in sectors like social care; ban certain unpaid internships; create Fair Pay Agreements in adult social care; ban unpaid internships except as part of education/training course.
- Sick pay: Strengthen statutory sick pay (SSP), make it available for all workers and remove the waiting period. Rate to represent fair earnings replacement.
- Tips: Strengthen the law to ensure hospitality workers receive their tips in full and workers decide how tips are allocated.
- Close pay gaps: Publication of ethnicity and disability pay gaps to be mandatory for firms with more than 250 staff.
- Tackle harassment: Require employers to create and maintain workplaces and working conditions free from harassment, including by third parties.
- Flexible working: Making flexible working the default from day one for all workers except where it is not reasonably feasible.
- Family-friendly: Make parental leave a day one right; introduce right to bereavement leave; make it unlawful to dismiss pregnant employees for six months after return from maternity leave except in specific circumstances.
- Caring responsibilities: Review implementation of carer’s leave and examine benefits of introducing paid carer’s leave.
- Zero-hours contracts: Ban “one-sided” flexibility; anyone working regular hours for 12 weeks or more will gain right to a regular contract to reflect hours worked; and all workers to get reasonable notice of any change in shifts or working time, and recompense for cancelled shifts.
- Fire and re-hire: Improve information and consultation procedures by replacing statutory code of practice introduced by current Government with a stronger one; adapt unfair dismissal and redundancy legislation to prevent workers being dismissed for not agreeing to a worse contract.
- Wellbeing : Support wellbeing of workers and their long term physical and mental health, assess whether existing regulations and guidance is adequate to support and protect those experiencing the symptoms of long Covid.
- Menopause: Require large employers with more than 250 employees to produce Menopause Action Plans.
- Right to switch off: Introduce a new right to disconnect and protect workers from remote surveillance.
- Artificial intelligence: Work with workers, trade unions, employers and experts to examine what AI and new technologies mean for work, jobs and skills.
- Update trade union laws: Strengthen trade union right of entry to workplaces; simplify process of union recognition; strengthen protections for trade union reps; and new duty on employers to inform workforce of right to join a union in their written contract.
- Enforcement rights: Extend time limit for bringing Employment Tribunal claims to six months; simplify enforcement of equal pay; establish a single enforcement body to enforce worker rights.
Conservatives
- Continue current agenda: Neonatal care leave and pay; reform of industrial action laws; Back to Work plan including proposed reform of fit notes; reform of umbrella company market; continue with National Disability Strategy; address definition of “sex” in Equality Act 2010; reintroduction of employment tribunal fees; reform of non-compete clauses; proposed reform to TUPE; right to paternity leave after bereavement.
- Bills currently being debated: Various including Bullying and Respect at Work Bill; Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill; and Unpaid Trial Work Periods (Prohibition) Bill.
Liberal Democrats
- Parental leave reform: Give all workers, including self-employed parents, a day-one right to parental leave and pay. Each parent would get six weeks of “use-it-or-lose-it” leave, with 46 weeks of parental leave to share between themselves as they choose. After the initial six weeks, parental pay would be £350 per week.
- Increase paternity pay: Increase paternity pay to 90% of earnings, with a cap for high earners.