The Home Office is picking up the pace on immigration compliance matters – we have seen increased activity on everything from right to work enforcement to visa curtailments as well as requests for further evidence across all aspects of sponsorship. We will be focusing on these and other challenges in our webinar on 14 September … Continue Reading
Of course it could just be coincidence, but scarcely hours after my post last week concerning the dearth of the employment law candidates for the Brexit red-tape bonfire, out pops a Gov.uk policy paper on “Smarter Regulation to Grow the Economy” containing the first five suggested victims. And what a woeful little bunch they are, … Continue Reading
Things have surely come to a pretty pass when it is front page news twice in two weeks that the Government has decided not to press on with doing something daft. First, the abandonment of smart motorways and last week, reports that the Government has backed away from its original proposal to wipe all EU-sourced … Continue Reading
So if in some parallel universe you had somehow acquired the ability to strike red lines through EU-derived employment legislation, where would you put them? That is a question I put well before the Brexit Referendum to countless HR audiences, the very people one might think would be straining at the leash to make changes … Continue Reading
The thing about one-stop shops is that if they do not stock what you want, they become next best thing to useless. Anyway, welcome to the government’s new Guidance on Employment Status, expressly billed in the accompanying press release as meeting all your worker status needs in one handy document. … Continue Reading
A basic principle of good employment law, you would think, should be that you can tell an employer when you are caught by it and when you are not. An early fail then for the rules around worker status, in particular following the EAT’s recent decision in Johnson –v- Transopco UK Limited, which appears to … Continue Reading
ISS Facility Services – v – Govaerts was a European Court of Justice case in March 2020 concerning what happened where the work being done by a group of employees was split up and all sold or contracted off in different directions. Traditionally the UK view has been that the employee would go with whichever … Continue Reading
All the smart money is on 2021 to see an increased number of grievances and Employment Tribunal claims as the pandemic support regime winds down. Therefore this is probably a good moment to look at the practical lessons to be taken from Cole – v – Elders Voice in the Employment Appeal Tribunal last month … Continue Reading
Quite a fun little case on TUPE this week, if you like that sort of thing (and on the upside, even if you don’t, at least it has nothing to do with COVID-19). Regulation 4(4) of TUPE states that TUPE-related changes to terms of employment are void in most circumstances. This has long been read … Continue Reading
Regulation 7(1) of TUPE usually makes a dismissal automatically unfair if it is for a reason connected with the business transfer. But what if the reason for the dismissal is actually good old personal dislike and the transfer is just the context in which it surfaced?… Continue Reading
What a remarkably prescient little message from the late Louis Armstrong to all those employers on the receiving end of a service provision change under TUPE. Regulation 3 of TUPE says that a service provision change occurs where activities cease to be carried out by one business and are contracted-out, moved between external contractors or … Continue Reading
Do you ever think that your line managers are making such a hash of a grievance or disciplinary process that it would be easier to do it yourself? Do you watch in horror as they stumble blindly but unerringly towards what is clearly the wrong decision? Are you tempted to give them a nudge in … Continue Reading
In almost every TUPE transfer, whether a business sale or a service provision change (SPC), you come eventually to the chap receiving permanent health insurance benefits. The transferor has no need for him any longer and the transferee has no wish to bump up its own PHI premiums for someone who is seemingly never going … Continue Reading
When a client asks you to take one of your staff off its account, you will tend to jump to it – the client is always right, even when it’s wrong, and you can hopefully find the displaced employee a berth on another account, no harm done. However, where the client is asking you to … Continue Reading
In a move that has surprised many, the UK Government has proposed repealing the amendments made to the TUPE Regulations in 2006 which sought to ensure that most service provision changes were brought within the scope of the Regulations. Given that what both employers and employees so desperately want in a SPC situation is greater … Continue Reading
For a committed football fan such as this author, the mid-Summer (yes, apparently it is summer outside, though it is hard to tell through the rain) can be a depressing time. No more than a few days have passed since England’s usual exit from the last major footie tournament, but already fans are desperate for … Continue Reading
A team from our Frankfurt office has won a long-running transfer of undertakings case, Klarenberg v Minteq International GmbH. Last month, the German Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) decided in favour of our client, Minteq International GmbH, the German subsidiary of Minerals Technologies Group, following an important ruling made in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) … Continue Reading