Blog
Business Development: Playing The Right Card
Leor Franks
27 October 2011
Default Retirement Age – or Not?
Changes to employment law happen twice a year, in early April and early October. The changes at the beginning of this month were fairly modest, but the biggest was the final disappearance of the default retirement age, in other words the age at which a forced retirement will not trigger a possible age discrimination claim. But, without a default retirement age, will employers be able to set their own individual retirement ages for their workforce, or sections of their workforce, rather than dealing with each employee’s retirement individually.
14 October 2011
Not enough women on boards? Or not enough women who are qualified?
The majority of Britain’s largest companies have so far failed to set targets for the number of women they have on their boards, despite recommendations by Lord Davies.
10 October 2011
This is no way to deal with employment law reform!
It may have taken the Government some time to get cracking with its programme of employment law reform, but we thought it was getting things organised when it released “Resolving Workplace Disputes” in January 2011 containing, as it did, a large number of proposals seeking to head off employment disputes reaching the Tribunal in the first place, and then if they did, improving the system such as to ensure they were processed more efficiently than now. We have been waiting many months for the Government to reply to all the responses that were sent into the Paper, and then all of a sudden, doubtless to coincide with the Conference of the Conservative Party in Manchester last week, a number of announcements were made, and in some cases snatched back almost as quickly as they had been released!
18 August 2011
New protections for Agency Workers from 1 October 2011
The Agency Workers Regulations 2010 (“the Regulations”) are due to come into force on 1 October 2011. They give agency workers important new rights and will have a significant impact in practice because there are an estimated 1.3 million agency workers in the UK, and the UK economy depends on agency workers to a much greater extent than most other European economies.
18 August 2011
Can an employer ever reduce its employees’ pay without being sued?
This is a question we are often asked. There was a series of cases in 1980s and 1990s which was generally thought to have clarified the position. If a company is facing serious financial difficulties (perhaps not so serious that the only way of saving the business would be by reducing pay, but very serious nonetheless), then, subject to an employer following the correct procedure, it can be possible to insist upon a salary reduction. If the employees refuse, then their existing contracts of employment may be brought to an end, and they can be offered fresh terms matching the old, save for salary, which is at the reduced level.