April 2021 Newsletter April 2021 Review Welcome to our review of employment law news in April 2021. Law firms in focus A former partner in Freeths Solicitors has won a disability discrimination claim resulting from how he was treated after being diagnosed with mental health problems and “burn out”. As reported by Legal Futures, Mike Taplin…
Welcome to our March newsletter. We have moved! We’ve been very busy during lockdown. As well as providing our full range of legal services, we have just completed our move to newly refurbished offices at St. Nicholas House, Old Churchyard, Liverpool L2 8TX. Our offices are located just opposite the Mercure Atlantic Tower Hotel with…
Welcome to our February newsletter. It’s been a busy month so here goes! The “one way road to freedom” On 22 February, Boris Johnson announced to Parliament, and subsequently the nation, his much awaited “roadmap”, setting out the earliest dates by which the current restrictions might be relaxed in the coming months. You can view…
Welcome to our final newsletter of what has been an extraordinary 2020. Normally, our December newsletter includes news about what to expect in 2021 but, needless to say, I’m not going to be foolhardy enough to predict anything beyond the basics at this stage. All we do know is that the workplace and general upheaval…
The Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTR’s) state that workers are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks’ leave per year with part-time workers being entitled to a pro-rated amount of this figure. For example, an employee working full time would be entitled to 28 days per year (5 days x 5.6 = 28) whereas a part-time employee working say 3 days per week, would be entitled to 16.8 days per year (3 days x 5.6 = 16.8 days).
The above is clearly a straightforward calculation, however the situation becomes more complicated for workers who do not have ‘normal working hours’. Under the Employment Rights Act 1996 (ERA) if an employee works irregular hours, their holiday pay should be calculated using an average of their pay over the last 12 weeks. On the basis that the 5.6 weeks leave entitlement amounts to 12.07% of a worker’s hours (12.07% reached by dividing 5.6 by 46.4 (total number of weeks in a year less 5.6 weeks holiday), employers have generally calculated holiday pay as 12.07% of pay for each hour worked (i.e. the assumption was that the calculation for both the amount of holidays and holiday pay, would be the same). The recent case of The Harpur Trust v Brazel however, shows that the same approach does not work for both…
Does a worker’s holiday entitlement continue to accrue into successive years if they do not take their annual leave because their employer will not pay them for these holidays? The Advocate General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has answered ‘yes’ to this question, in a non-binding opinion. In the case of King v…
In the case of MPT Group Ltd v Peel and others [2017] EWHC 1222 (Ch), the High Court was asked to decide whether employees were under a duty to disclose their intention to compete to their employer. The facts of the case were that Mr Peel and Mr Birtwistle were employed by MPT Group Ltd…
Following on from my colleague Martin Malone’s article back in March, takeaway delivery Company Deliveroo have now removed the clause in their self-employed courier’s contracts (or ‘supplier agreements’), which stated that the couriers would not be permitted to challenge their self-employed status at an Employment Tribunal. New contracts (which are now just four pages long)…
In the recent case of Government Legal Services v Brookes UKEAT/0302/16, the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) upheld the decision of the Employment Tribunal (ET) that requiring a job applicant with Asperger’s to take a multiple-choice test as part of the recruitment process, amounted to indirect discrimination. Background The facts of the case were that the Government Legal…
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has recently considered this question, more specifically whether workers are entitled to the national minimum wage when ‘on-call’ (or sleeping!) at work. In the case of Focus Care Agency v Roberts, along with two other cases heard at the same time (Frudd v The Partington Group Ltd and Royal Mencap Society…