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
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
With the end of the Coronvirus Job Retention Scheme now only half a dozen weeks away we are seeing the first reported Employment Tribunal decisions around the interplay of the CJRS and redundancy dismissals. This brings us the beginnings of an answer to the challenge many employers will have faced since the Scheme was introduced … Continue Reading
At the risk of kicking in an open door, working from home and the return to the office has become this summer’s hot topic. In Belgium the pandemic has meant that working from home where you could was mandatory until the end of June. Employees are now gradually returning to the workplace but surveys show … Continue Reading
So there it is. Subject to a final review next week, said the Prime Minister last night, it will no longer be necessary for the government to instruct people to work from home. From 19 July, all businesses can re-open, no‑one has to wear a mask or stay more than a metre from others and … Continue Reading
Over 700 people signed up to our Handling Grievances webinar last week, reinforcing our view that the return to the workplace (RTW) process is going to be a fertile breeding ground for such complaints by employees, some around new working conditions, some alleging health and safety failures and others just to vent minor unhappinesses and … Continue Reading
In line with the impending movement back to the physical workplace comes some updated Acas guidance around consultation with your workforce about preventing the Coronavirus in the process. The line between communication and consultation in the guidance is not always clearly marked, but that should not be an issue in view of Acas’s injunction that … Continue Reading
It’s not natural for our freedoms and permissions to be limited in the way they have been since last March, so whatever one’s own views, it is hardly surprising that some have found those restrictions hard to swallow and have railed against COVID-19 related rules, state imposed or otherwise. The requirement to wear masks in … Continue Reading
Here are answers to two more of the questions which came up at our webinar last week, this time dealing with employee resistance to workplace Covid testing and the wisdom or otherwise of agreeing to post-lockdown WFH without formal changes to terms of employment. If an employee refuses to be tested at work, how should … Continue Reading
As we saw the covid graphs get steeper each day of last week, it is no real surprise that the Belgian government has now announced a new “Easter lockdown” for the next four weeks. Schools will close as of this Friday for an extended Easter break, that increasingly imperative haircut will have to wait another … Continue Reading
As attention turns increasingly to the practicalities of the physical return to the workplace in what may be little over 3 months, questions of employers’ rights and obligations in relation to testing and vaccination are becoming more common. These are vexed areas which can easily put common interest into conflict with civil liberties. Just how … Continue Reading
So there it is, Boris’s long-heralded 4 Step plan for the country to move forward into our new future. Lots of statistics, cautions and caveats, but what does the 60-page “COVID-19 Response – Spring 2021” document presented to Parliament yesterday contain for employers? Is there anything new or is it, like the paper the original … Continue Reading
In order to ensure that as many people as possible are vaccinated, the trade unions and the employers’ organisations in the National Labour Council have agreed that employees will be allowed to take the necessary time off to be vaccinated. If enough vaccines are available, at-risk patients will be vaccinated from April onwards and the … Continue Reading
So here we are all again and, says the Government’s latest guidance, able to leave home to work only where it is “unreasonable for you to do your job from home“. This is the umpteenth permutation of the same underlying message about working from home if you can, and was almost certainly meant to say … Continue Reading
In a previous blog we noted that as of November 2020, Belgium would again be in semi-lockdown and that one of the measures re-imposed was the obligation to work from home, unless this is realistically impossible. Employees whose work requires them to go the office need a confirmatory certificate from their employer attesting to this … Continue Reading
So we hear by Twitter on Thursday last week that from the crack of dawn on Saturday just gone, “high-value business travellers” are partially exempt from self-isolation requirements when entering or returning to England. A number of media, arts and sports roles have been granted an exemption also. “Conditions apply”, it said, and so they … Continue Reading
In the earlier parts of this blog series (part 1 & part 2) we saw that for the most part, asking your employees to take the covid-19 vaccination will be a reasonable management request and that their refusal to do so will usually be deemed unreasonable at law. Against that background, how should the employer … Continue Reading
So a government-approved vaccination becomes available and you really want your employees to take it. Can you just insist, or does the development of the vaccine turn out to have been the easy bit? Here and in further posts to follow shortly are some headline thoughts on the point. Please note that these will be … Continue Reading
Time to answer another interesting question which came up at our Managing Working Parents webinar a couple of weeks ago: Where the employee is unable to come into work for childcare reasons, what are my duties to provide him with work suitable to be done from home? This was a question which we might have … Continue Reading
On top of the flexible working rules (see Parts 1-3), another piece of existing law likely to get a pandemic-related dusting-off in the months to come is our old friend whistleblowing. If you face what is otherwise a fairly clear redundancy situation because Covid-19 has gutted your employer’s market, what better way of upping the … Continue Reading
The Belgian government is acutely aware that businesses will feel the impact of the Covid-19 crisis well beyond the summer months. To that end, a new set of measures was decided during the Inner Cabinet meeting of 12 June. Information on these measures is still scarce, but we thought we’d share the highlights with you … Continue Reading
If we are right to think that the unravelling of lockdown will be accompanied by a sharp increase in the number of employees requesting to work from home, then many employers will shortly start to face some serious posers in relation to the flexible working scheme. These are not new questions, but will be thrown into … Continue Reading
The world of work has remained broadly the same for the last 100 to 200 years – offices might have lost the wood panelling, trains become less smoky (inside and out!), top hats turned into bowler hats then no hats, beards have gone in, out, then back into fashion, but the central tenet remains – … Continue Reading
In a bid to reawaken the Australian economy, the Federal Government is developing a return to work health and safety “toolkit” and is encouraging workplaces to become “COVID-safe”. At the same time, the Government is continuing to encourage the public to download its COVIDSafe digital contact-tracing App.… Continue Reading
