What is the point of employment law? Should you try to work out an answer to the question through the changes which the Coalition government has been making in 2012 and 2013, the first thing you would conclude is that the law exists to rewrite industrial relations to the benefit of employers at the expense of workers.
No “reform” illustrates this better than the changes which are being made to dismissal procedures, starting from this summer, to prevent a tribunal from enquiring about the conversations between employer and employee in the run-up to dismissal. Where an employer proposes that an employee should consent to their own dismissal, this will be deemed a “protected conversation”. If the negotiations break down and the employee maintains afterwards that the employer said something crucial to their dismissal that shines a bright light on the unfairness of all that followed and all that came before, the Tribunal will not be entitled to enquire what it was that the employer said. The proposal is in fact even worse than this makes it sound. The “protection” only operates in one direction. Should the employer want to rely on his own words later – for example, because he made a cash offer to the worker, which the worker failed to beat in subsequent litigation – this will not be protected. The employer can tell the Tribunal, and the Tribunal could perfectly easily take this into account when deciding for example who should pay the costs of the litigation.
Me for New Left Project. More here.
