If you have become weary of the several seconds it can sometimes take you to get from opening up Global Edge to reaching information on your usual country of choice, we can help you! Global Edge 2.0 allows each country what is effectively its own home page containing immediate access to helpful summaries, future legal … Continue Reading
Against the background of industrial unrest in other sectors, the social partners of Joint Committee 200 –the Committee representing the largest number of employees in the country, more than 480.000 in total – have quietly come to an agreement on employment and working conditions. The most important provisions of the agreement are summarized within this … Continue Reading
Back in June Acas produced a report on the “fire and re-hire” practices used by some employers to make detrimental changes to employees’ terms and conditions of employment. In essence, the employee is given notice of dismissal from his old contract but offered immediate reinstatement on a new one which incorporates the changes the employer wanted … Continue Reading
Restrictive covenants are a common feature of many employment contracts. They are favoured by employers which want to ensure that departing employees will not solicit business, compete, poach clients or colleagues, and so on. When they are needed they are really needed and so this is an important question. It is always good practice to … Continue Reading
Our webinar on disciplinary proceedings last week began unpromisingly – there is no new law and little new practice to learn, I had to say, not necessarily what you want to hear from your legal training session. Nonetheless, we had several hundred sign-ups, perhaps tribute to the enduring mystique and indeed terror implicit in conducting … Continue Reading
In the wave of sunny optimism following the roll-out of our vaccination programme this spring-summer, few people in Belgium had anticipated that the Covid situation would worsen again, or do so as quickly as it has. And yet the numbers of infections and patients in intensive care are now at an all-time high. New stricter … Continue Reading
One of the traditional shortcomings of conventional international employment law resources is that they are very good at what was and not bad on what is, but quite hopeless on what will be. So it takes a pretty special product to give you not just news of international employment law developments in the pipeline but … Continue Reading
The Employment Appeal Tribunal recently handed down its judgment in Augustine v Data Cars Ltd. The case concerned a taxi driver who alleged that his pay had fallen below the National Minimum Wage, but the arguments upheld by the EAT have far wider significance than the cabbing industry – they extend to any employer with … Continue Reading
London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham – v – Keable is an EAT case with everything in it – Nazis, Holocaust deniers, Momentum activists and Members of Parliament, though not necessarily all at the same time. Oddly, despite this outstandingly diverse cast, the most important part of the decision for employers is actually the EAT’s … Continue Reading
They say that if you are prepared to take a sufficiently comprehensive trawl through the options list and are not over-burdened by considerations of practicality or taste, there are 8 million possible permutations on a new Mini. You can’t do that with Global Edge 2.0, but who really wants 8 million choices? While it doesn’t … Continue Reading
If you look for the statutory source of the ordinary right to bring a workplace grievance, you may be gone some time. It arose initially as a by-product of the implied duty of trust and confidence, and formally bubbled to the surface in WA Gould (Pearmak) Limited – v – McConnell in 1995. There the … Continue Reading
I used to think that our Global Edge International Employment Law product was pretty slick. So did others, as we secured a Legal Business UK Award for Legal Technology Team of the year. But now we have Global Edge 2.0, updated, uprated, up-scaled and just generally upped, and that is a wholly new set of capabilities … Continue Reading
On 19 October, Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President and Commissioner for Competition of the European Commission, delivered a speech addressing the EU’s current policy when addressing cartels, potential changes to the Commission’s leniency program and recent dawn-raid efforts. Most notably, Vestager spoke about so-called ‘no-poach’ agreements, whereby companies agree not to recruit each other’s workers and/or … Continue Reading
Here is another good question from our What Next webinar a couple of weeks ago. More to follow soon. If someone whose role involves International travel has a medical condition which makes that travel undesirable in a post-pandemic World, would the capability dismissal process be applicable? Probably so, but we need to look at the … Continue Reading
That was according to a US economist, Thomas Sowell, but it also came up at a recent webinar we did on whistle-blowing and grievance investigations. We were talking about limits on the employer’s ability to use evidence from witnesses whose identities would not be disclosed to the person accused. The short point was that to … Continue Reading
Global businesses today face an ever-increasing set of complex issues. From managing flexible and hybrid working arrangements borne out of the pandemic, to meeting diversity and inclusion expectations and demonstrating the worth of their workforce, each issue brings its own challenges that employers must successfully address if they are to stay competitive. How employers address … Continue Reading
The Court of Appeal confirmed in Gwynedd Council – v – Barratt and Hughes last month that the failure to offer an employee the right to appeal against his dismissal will not inevitably make the termination unfair but is merely one piece of the puzzle in a range of factors which are considered when determining … Continue Reading
Unless as part of a band, I always think that blowing your own trumpet is rather poor form, but any such scruples which many lawyers usually have around such things are dumped in a heartbeat when the latest legal directory rankings are released. LinkedIn lights up instantly with more humblebragging than Oscars Night, though without … Continue Reading
If ever a government consultation was overtaken by events, it is this week’s offering on Making Flexible Working the Default. For many employers this is now pushing at a door which is not just open but blown clean off its hinges by the pandemic and the WFH experience of the last 18 months. The Consultation … Continue Reading
In deciding whether to allow an employee’s request to continue a full or partial remote working schedule, what account should be taken of the reasons for that request? In our ‘What next’ webinar last week, I indicated that in most cases the safest answer to this question is “none”, and that the employee’s reasons for … Continue Reading
We made an employee redundant before the furlough scheme ended – will his unfair dismissal claim succeed? The basic argument here is an easy one to understand – you made me redundant when you did not have to because my salary was being borne by the CJRS. In circumstances where employers are duty-bound to consider … Continue Reading
There has been surprisingly little in the press around what is going to happen when the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme ends on 30 September. Will there be the jobs Armageddon that some have forecast, or will roles for the million or so people still on furlough at the end of August reappear in time to … Continue Reading
At the end of our What Next webinar this week I announced boldly that either we had had no questions from the floor or I had done something hideous to the IT and lost them. With depressing predictability it was the latter, sorry. In fact we got a good score of questions across a wide range … Continue Reading
Periodically a case comes along to remind us that underneath all good dismissal practice, Acas guidance and the rest is The Law, and that The Law is sometimes less rigid in its requirements of a fair dismissal than all that guidance might suggest. Moore -v- Phoenix Product Development Limited is today’s such case, an everyday … Continue Reading
