4 weeks ago
Labour’s plans for Employment Law
Labour’s plans for employment law
YouGov polls show Labour heading for a landslide victory. If polling is correct, businesses will face a significant number of changes to employment legislation as Labour have said in their manifesto they plan to implement their “Plan to Make Work Pay” in full. This separate 23-page plan states that they will introduce legislation within 100 days of entering government, although some changes will take longer to implement. These are some of the more noteworthy proposed changes.
Unfair dismissal
Possibly the change which will have the biggest practical impact will be the plan to give all workers unfair dismissal protection from day one. The Plan does go on to say they will ensure employers can operate a probationary period, but it does not go into any further detail. Whether the right to claim unfair dismissal does start on day one, or whether the practical implementation will be a serious shortening of the service needed to claim, this change would allow many more people to bring claims that are currently able to. The shortest this right has been for qualification historically has been 6 months.
Day One
As well as the plan to introduce unfair dismissal protection from day one, they also plan to make a number of other rights and entitlements “day one” rights. These include the right to make a flexible working request, the right to parental leave and the right to SSP from the first day of absence.
Fire and rehire
Following negative headlines concerning “fire and rehire”, where employers such as Tesco and P&O Ferries either tried or did give notice to terminate contracts and offered continued employment on worse terms (or replaced the staff with agency staff), the current government issued a Code of Practice. Labour say businesses must still be able to restructure where there is genuinely no alternative but say a proper process must be followed. Therefore we suspect that “fire and rehire” will not be removed completely, rather they say they will introduce their own strengthened code of practice, which would need to be followed.
Single status of worker
Whilst not something planned for the first 100 days but for the first year, Labour have said they plan to remove the distinction between employees and workers, meaning there will be a single status of worker with the rights currently enjoyed by employees. Self-employed status would remain. This means those who are workers would have the right to claim unfair dismissal.
New or extended rights
Labour say they plan to introduce a number of new rights, such as the right to bereavement leave for all workers, the right to switch off and the right for self-employed individuals to a written contract. Whilst women are already protected from maternity discrimination, they have also said they will make it unlawful to dismiss a woman who is pregnant through to six months after she returns to work (except in specific circumstances).
We will be publishing a separate article focusing on the manifesto pledges made by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties.