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Blog posts tagged equal rights
Gossip Girl gets rights
October 05, 2010
One of the lesser-known changes to the law in the Equality Act is that businesses must stop using pay “gagging” clauses to keep their affairs discreet. The new law is pretty straightforward - employees who suspect a gender pay gap is afoot can no longer be disciplined for revealing, or discussing, pay with each other.
If you grumble at or discipline your staff for talking about their wages and benefits, you could be liable to claims for victimisation – possibly resulting in an employment tribunal, no joke for you or the firm. But is the threat of a court case OTT for a boss trying to ban staff gossip?
Many people think so. Writing in the Daily Mail, Duncan Bannatyne points out the original Equal Pay Act of 1970 improved lives, but chunters: “This 2010 update will not”. He maintains that this particular tweak to equality law will “damage the morale of a workplace” and suggests that: “Any difference [in pay] is immediately cast as ‘unfairness’, with the employer as the abuser and the employee the victim.”
It’s easy to understand, and sympathise with, employers’ concern for Political Correctness Gone Mad. Especially when, like Bannatyne, you believe in automatic equal rights and have been a highly successful employer for years. As staff numbers trooping to tribunals increase yearly, the creeping fear of an employee springing a trumped-up case will hardly be soothed by the news that in, another legal add-on, staff can now claim discrimination even though there may be no one to compare them against.
Yet maybe what Bannatyne calls “lunatic legislation” is not so unreasonable. These days over half the UK’s workforce are women. For full-timers, the equal pay gap is currently over 16 per cent. Women get paid 35 per cent less for part-time work.
Forty years on from the Equal Pay Act, that’s something of a surprise, and not in a good way. Yet Bannatyne hints that the new law “could be enough for some business owners to take a look at this brave new working environment and say: ‘I’m out.’”
In the UK, the most notable career legacy most women leave from their working lives is the six figures in cash they never get paid. Despite the risky life of an entrepreneur, that’s not a problem Bannatyne or his fellow business owners are liable to face.
Women's rights - or wrongs?
June 07, 2010
If you’re an employee, you get statutory paid leave when you give birth, but what about the self-employed? Sure, you may be able to claim maternity allowance –social security benefit paid for 39 weeks - but it’s only £124.88 a week (or 90 per cent of your gross average weekly earnings, if less), and you can't claim if you are still working.
Now the EU is proposing that we give self-employed women - and the wives or partners of the male self-employed if they help their man out at work - at least 14 weeks' maternity leave allowance.
This will be paid out of a social insurance scheme, requiring contributions from the self-employed. The EU is leaving it up to each member state to decide whether women have to join a scheme – and pay - or whether to make joining voluntary.
Will this help women? My fear with this proposal – and it’s a point I’ve made before on the LawDonut – is that here we are again, contemplating new laws designed to help women, without really knowing whether they will or not – whether they might even prejudice self-employed women - because no-one is really thinking the idea through or doing the research to find out what the real consequences will be.
We need women and men to have equal rights at work but when it comes to maternity rights, you could argue that the only law we’ve seen working properly to date is the law of unintended consequences.
For example, the anecdotal evidence is that the current rules on maternity leave and pay for women employees seem to be stopping some employers from taking women of child-bearing age on in the first place. Rather than do the research to find out if that’s true, and maybe think of other ways that women can be made equal, the (Labour) government’s reaction was to give women even more of those rights.
And my fear in relation to this new development is that, even if the government has the best of intentions, women will yet again end up suffering in the world of work – maybe having to pay for insurance that will pay out less than many would earn, but stopping them from working to supplement it – so that a measure intended to benefit them ends up doing the opposite.
And what’s with the women-only contributions scheme? Why aren’t men contributing to the payments? Women – who make up more than half the taxpayers in this country – don’t get reductions on their tax bill because they’re less likely to end up with the costly diseases many men get, or in prison and costing the taxpayer £1k a week.
Whose kids are these anyway? Shouldn’t both parents chip in towards something that indirectly contributes to the welfare of their offspring?
It will be at least two years before the UK has to bring the new rules in (though they have up to four years if they “find difficulties" in working out how to do this). The government is bound to consult, so get ready to have your say. My comment is, don’t do it until you’ve done the research that tells you it’ll work as it’s meant to work.
You’ll find much more about the rules on maternity leave and pay in the employment law section of the Law Donut
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