King's Speech-worker's rights..

[CurlewKate]

Apparently, the government is proposing legislation that will make protection from unfair dismissal a day one right- not as it currently is and kicking in after 2 years. Huge if true.....

so they’re not “about to introduce” anything

they are about to discuss a proposal

‘Introduce’ can also mean raise the topic. You’re splitting hairs a bit. They have a massive majority. They have to go through the process but if they want it to happen it’ll happen.

But great for the poor people they exploit.

I've always thought that there shouldn't be any time limit at all to claim unfair dismissal.
A dismissed person could have given up a job that they'd worked in for 20 years to move to the employment that they were subsequently unfairly dismissed from.
Employers who have good reasons to dismiss people, and then do it in a fair and reasonable manner, will have absolutely nothing to worry about.

we will just have to disagree
because someone say “labour is about to introduce a new law” i don’t think they mean “Labour are about to introduce a discussion about the introduction of a new law” 😆

What you are talking about is passing a new law.

i think we are talking at cross purposes

my comment was about a tiktok video

Where does it say it's a Green Paper?

Also, who said this? "labour are about to introduce a new law”

opening line of the tiktokker you posted the link to

I foresee a lot fewer straight to perm jobs maybe. Temp to perm so the employer can avoid committing to you for x months.

well Labour

labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Employment-Rights-Green-Paper.pdf

Wonderful. I really hope it goes through. I was astounded when the Tories changed it with so little pushback. There was barely a mention of it. At the time it made several female colleagues in their 30s very nervous to move employers.

Gosh, @InvestinITMN you are getting a bit ariated about this! Thank you for providing useful sources.

you asked a question
i answered 🤷

What was it before the Tories increased it to 2 years? Was it day 1 or was there a date somewhere between the two.

It has never been day 1. It was 6 months immediately before, if I remember rightly. It was 2 years when it was first introduced in 1971 and has varied between that, 1 year and 6 months ever since.

I think 2 years was far too long. Six months is probably about right, and ties in with probationary periods as pps have said.

That rather depends how much the person understands the process of law making in the UK.

It should have been a day one right from the start - two years was an atrocious policy!

I was quite surprised it didn’t come up more in the Brexit debate. For all the talking about how they would maintain rights it was barely mentioned that the governing party was already removing workers rights and Brexit would leave a wide open door to removing some that weren’t an option for removing before.

It does stop probation periods as unfair dismissal protection starts from day 1. If an employee can bring claims from day 1 then it means employers will face consequences even if they were entirely justified in dismissal as they will have to deal with the costs and hassle of a tribunal action. it will disincentivize employment- it works better to have a qualification period (it was previously 1 year) to maintain flexibility.

Not sure why it “amazes” you that people understand there can be negative consequences for giving workers the right to bring claims with no qualification period.

*awful for the small employer though

and indeed any employer*

Only the ones who treat employees like shit.

One thing I can easily see happening if the right to bring an unfair dismissal claim becomes a day 1 right is a rise in.fixed term contracts for new starters.
We may also see a rise in employers deciding they’d rather pay agency fees vs the risks and costs of directly hiring own staff.

I can see this making change making it even harder for young people who are entering the job market with little to no proven work experience. It means if they end up being crap at the job it will be near on impossible to get rid of them.

I’m an employer and initially I was very nervous about this. Not because I’m in the business of unfairly dismissing people, but because sometimes people start working for us, and just aren’t very good, and we have to move them along within their probationary period. If I had to deal with a long and complicated dismissal process every time I took someone on, I just wouldn’t hire people from the U.K., or seriously consider if responsibilities could be taken on by existing employees.

However, from what I have read, probationary periods will still apply.

Secondly - the pure hassle and cost of dealing with claims, even if you’re confident you haven’t done anything wrong, is so punitive, especially for small businesses. We have dealt with a disability discrimination claim before which we have written proof isn’t going to be successful, and yet it has still taken over 18 months of our previous employee refusing to consider the evidence and sticking to her position, and has cost us at least 25k to defend.

So anything that leads to increases in ability for people to claim is going to be costly and time consuming for employers.

In general I’m in favour of robust employee rights as we treat our employees very well, but the consequence will obviously be fewer people being taken a chance on. Eg we took on an 18 year old who was keen but with zero experience - knowing that if he was hopeless we could move him on. If we had the risk of a claim from day 1 we would not have taken that chance (he luckily wasn’t hopeless!)