Top of the lawyers

When asked to name the top ten lawyers whose work should be familiar to all students, the Professor of Law at the Open University included William Henry Thompson, the founder of Thompsons, in his list.

Prof. Gary Slapper said in an article in The Times, that WH Thompson's achievements deserve to be ranked along-side such greats as Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Nelson Mandela.

Thompson, who qualified in 1908, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector and became the country's leading expert on working people's compensation.

A supporter of the suffragettes and co-founder of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), he established the firm of Thompsons in 1921. Today it is the largest personal injury and employment rights firm in the UK.

Stress management


A significant area of work for the Health and Safety Executive is stress at work. Its research shows that: 

  • about half a million people in the UK experience work-related stress at a level they believe is making them ill
  • up to five million people in the UK feel 'very' or 'extremely' stressed by their work
  • work-related stress costs society about £3.7 billion every year (at 1995/6 prices).

 

It recognises that pressure in itself is not necessarily bad and many people thrive on it - it is when pressure becomes excessive that people experience ill health.

As a result, the HSE has developed a series of standards of good management practice and produced a consultation document, asking for views from interested parties by 27 August. The standards that they look at include the demands that a job makes on a worker; the control people have over the job they do; the support they receive; and how organisational change is managed. 
If you want to contribute to the consultation, log on to www.hse.gov.uk/consult/condocs/stressms.htm.

Working to time

Following a consultation on the working time directive which closed at the end of March 2004 (see LELR 89), the European Commission has now published a discussion paper on proposed changes to the directive.

Aimed at the social partners (the representatives of both workers and employers), the Commission has identified a number of areas for negotiation. These include:

  • The future of the individual opt-out, which allows workers to opt out of the 48-hour maximum average, working week. The UK government wants to keep it, but the Commission has suggested that it may be phased out. The other alternative would be to tighten the conditions for applying it.
  • The definition of working time, which has been deemed by the European Court of Justice to include 'on-call' time, even if workers are asleep for much of that time. The Commission is asking the partners to decide how to treat 'inactive' on-call time - the UK government has already suggested excluding 'inactive' time from the definition of working time.
  • A review of reference periods over which the 48-hour average working week is calculated. It is currently 17 weeks, but can be extended by agreement, a trend that is already discernible.
  • A consideration of work-life balance and whether the directive is the tool to address it. The Commission recognises that this issue goes beyond working time, but thinks that the directive could be used to give a clearer steer. 
    The social partners have nine months to negotiate a collective agreement. If they cannot reach a consensus, the Commission can adopt measures set out in the consultation paper to revise the directive.

Disabled codes

The Disability Rights Commission has published two new Codes of Practice on Part 2 of the DDA (The Code of Practice on Employment and Occupation and the Code of Practice for Trade Organisations and Qualifications Bodies). These have been laid before Parliament and can be found at www.drc-gb.org.

Roll up roll up

In LELR 89 (May 2004) we reported that an employment appeal tribunal had decided to refer the issue of rolled-up holiday pay to the European Court of Justice. In the meantime, the Court of Appeal has decided in the composite cases of Clarke v Staddon and Caulfield v Marshalls Clay Products that the procedure is compatible with the EU Working Time Directive.

The judges looked at the policy behind the directive and asked whether 'rolling-up' holiday pay would undermine it. They thought not and went on to hold that the Working Time Regulations, which implement the directive in the UK, also allow for rolled-up holiday pay.

However, because of a number of inconsistent court decisions on the issue, the Court decided that this case should also be referred to the European Court of Justice. It is likely that it will be joined with Robinson-Steele v RF Retail Services Ltd.

No parental payout

The European Court of Justice has decided - in the case of Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund, Gewerkschaft der Privatangestellten v Wirtschaftskammer Österreich - that periods of parental leave do not have to be taken into account when calculating a termination payment.

The Gewerkschaftsbund, an Austrian trade union and the claimant in the case, made an application for a declaration that the first period of parental leave taken by a worker must be included when calculating length of service in a job, just as it is for military or civilian service.

It said that the difference in treatment between workers on parental leave (the majority of whom are women) and those on military service (a majority of whom are men) would otherwise constitute indirect discrimination prohibited by Article 141 of the EC Treaty.

But the ECJ disagreed on the basis that the two situations are not comparable. It said that parental leave is leave taken voluntarily by a worker in order to bring up a child. National service, on the other hand, represents a civic obligation laid down by law and is not governed by the individual interests of the worker.

In each case, the suspension of the contract of employment is based on particular reasons - in one, the interests of the worker and family and, in the other, the collective interests of the nation. As those reasons are of a different nature, the workers who benefit are not in comparable situations.

Accordingly, the court decided that Article 141 of the EC Treaty and Article 1 of the Equal Treatment Directive 'do not preclude the calculation of a termination payment from taking into account, as length of service, the duration of periods of military service or the civilian equivalent performed mainly by men but not of parental leave taken most often by women'.

It is worth noting that in the UK, service does accrue during periods of parental leave under our amended Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations.

Dispute resolution

The Department of Trade and Industry has produced detailed guidance notes for the statutory workplace disciplinary and grievance procedures, due to come into force on 1 October 2004.

They provide an explanation of the procedures and what they cover; the situations in which they apply; the exemptions; and the impact on tribunal applications. (See LELR 86 for a brief summary of the regulations, which will be featured in detail in a later edition). 
Although the guidance has no legal force and is aimed specifically at employment lawyers and human resource specialists, it is also likely to be of interest to trade union officials and lay representatives. It can be accessed at www.dti.gov.uk/er/comprehensive_guidance.pdf (PDF file).