Employment Update - 11 September 2009
Guidance on employing children
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has published Guidance on the employment of children, which is intended to set out the key provisions of the law on child employment, together with best practice advice, for employers, local authorities, parents and other stakeholders.
The Guidance, which covers employment in England, includes information on:
Substantial change in working conditions to employee's material detriment
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has confirmed that it is a question of fact whether there has been a substantial change in an employee's working conditions and the nature, as well as the degree, of change will need to be considered. When assessing whether the change is to the employee's detriment, an Employment Tribunal must consider the impact of the proposed change from the employee's point of view.
In Tapere v South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, the employee worked for Lewisham Primary Care Trust (the PCT). Her contract stated that her place of work was Burgess Park, Camberwell but it included a mobility clause which provided that she could be required to perform her duties either temporarily or permanently at other locations within the PCT. The employee was subsequently transferred to the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (the Trust) under The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE).
The Trust proposed to move the employee to Bethlem Hospital, Beckenham under the mobility clause but the employee was concerned about the impact this would have on her arrangements to collect her daughter from school. When she returned from holiday and was told to work at Bethlem Hospital, she resigned. The employee claimed constructive dismissal and argued that she had been dismissed as a result of a substantial change to her working conditions to her material detriment (under Regulation 4(9) of TUPE).
The Tribunal held that she had not been dismissed because, "viewed objectively", there had been no material change in her working conditions to her material detriment. The EAT disagreed. It confirmed that whether there had been a substantial change in working conditions was a question of fact, to be determined by reference to the nature and degree of change. When deciding whether a change was substantial, it was not necessary to consider whether the perspective should be objective or subjective.
When examining whether the change was to the employee's "material detriment", the impact of the proposed change also has to be more than trivial or fanciful and should be considered from the employee's point of view. The questions that should have been asked were whether the employee regarded the potential disruption to childcare arrangements and a longer journey as detrimental and, if so, whether that was a reasonable position for the employee to adopt.
The EAT substituted a finding that the employee had been dismissed and remitted the question of whether the dismissal was unfair to a fresh Employment Tribunal.
EHRC inquiry into financial services sector The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has published the findings from its inquiry into sex discrimination in the finance sector. The EHRC reports that the finance sector has one of the highest overall gender pay gaps in the UK economy, with women working full-time earning 55 per cent less annual gross salary than men. This compares to a pay gap of 28 per cent for the economy generally.
The findings, which include data from a questionnaire sent to 50 companies employing 22.6 per cent of workers in the sector, reveal that women receive around 80 per cent less in performance-related pay and that nearly all women taking up new jobs in these companies still start on lower average salaries than men.
Other findings from the inquiry include:
CIPD executive pay guidelines
The principles are designed to provide a framework to help HR directors and Remuneration Committees when developing executive remuneration policies, practices and structures and have been drawn up to be applicable across sector, industry and organisation size.
Staff fraud on the rise as recession bites
Cases filed by CIFAS staff fraud members for 'dishonest action by staff to obtain a benefit by theft or deception' (e.g. the falsification of expenses or time sheets and targets) increased by 69 per cent in the first six months of 2009 (when compared with the last six months of 2008). Of particular interest is that, in the 69 per cent increase of dishonest actions by staff, the number of women involved during the first half of 2009 more than doubled when compared with the last half of 2008.
Employers are gradually cracking down on which websites their staff can view and are increasingly choosing to block access to popular social networking sites, according to data from ScanSafe.
According to their data, there has been a 20 per cent increase in the number of customers blocking social networking sites in the last six months. At present, 76 per cent of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping (52 per cent), weapons (75 per cent), alcohol (64 per cent), sports (51 per cent) and Webmail (58 per cent). However, less than half (47 per cent) take the same approach to blocking online banking.
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