Employment law stories in the news – 05.09.2016 to 11.09.2016

redmans-blog-newsIn the latests of our series of posts on employment law stories in the news, we take a look at ten employment law stories that have made headlines between 5 September 2016 and 11 September 2016

  1. Met Police officers ‘expect to be victimised’ for race and sex discrimination complaints – Metropolitan Police officers expect to be victimised and have their careers damaged if they complain about racial or sexual discrimination, a report has found. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigated Scotland Yard’s handling of discrimination complaints after the controversial case of firearms officer Carol Howard (The Evening Standard)
  2. Hermes may face HMRC investigation into allegations of low pay – The government has asked tax inspectors to consider investigating allegations of low pay by self-employed couriers working for the doorstep delivery company Hermes. The business minister Margot James has requested that HM Revenue and Customs consider launching a “proactive investigation” into the arrangements used by Hermes (The Guardian)
  3. Lawyer for Carol Howard reacts to EHRC report on discrimination in the Metropolitan Police – Leading employment law specialist Kiran Daurka, who advised Carol Howard in her Tribunal claims, has joined calls for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) to urgently improve its handling of internal discrimination complaints in order to maintain public confidence (Lexology)
  4. MP calls for statutory bereavement leave for parents – Will Quince, Conservative MP for Colchester, says that parents who suffer the death of a child should be eligible for statutory bereavement leave. Mr Quince and his wife, Eleanor, had a baby who was stillborn. He told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House why he is pushing for a bill in Parliament (BBC)
  5. Illness forces 12% of workers to quit before pension age – TUC – Ill-health or disability is forcing one in eight people to stop working before they reach the state pension age, the TUC says. It found almost half a million people have had to leave work for medical reasons within five years before they were due to retire (BBC)
  6. Sports Direct ditches zero-hours jobs and ups worker representation – Sports Direct is to put a workers’ representative on its board and offer shop staff guaranteed hours instead of zero-hours contracts after admitting a string of failings in an internal report (The Guardian)
  7. Women seek pay rises as much as men – with less success – The theory that women get paid less than men because they are not sufficiently pushy in the workplace is not true, a new study suggests. Women are as likely as men to ask for a pay rise – but are less likely to get one, the research found (BBC)
  8. Judges hit out at plans for devolution of employment tribunals to Scotland – Judges have launched a scatching attack on plans to devolve employment tribunals to Scotland claiming the reforms will “seriously” undermine the system and lead to a “second rate” service (Herald Scotland)
  9. Ministers warned not to cut national living wage rises – The government should ignore calls to limit future increases to the national living wage, a think-tank said. The living wage of £7.20 per hour was introduced in April, benefitting more than a million staff aged 25 and over (BBC)
  10. More than 900,000 UK workers now on zero-hours contracts – The number of UK workers on zero-hours contracts has leapt 20% in a year to more than 900,000, indicating that insecure employment has become a permanent and growing feature of the jobs market (The Guardian)