We have now truly bid farewell to summertime. The clocks have changed, the nights are drawing in and the leaves are starting to fall. Wouldn’t it be great if we had another bank holiday today to cheer us all up?
The TUC has joined together with the main voluntary organisations to call for a new bank [...]

Filed under: Employment law, Work-life balance, Working time | Comments Off

I’ve just had a phone call from an employee whose boss told him that he would be treated as “absent without leave” yesterday, even though he had phoned his workplace and left a message saying that he would not be able to get to work because there were no buses running throughout the city. This took place on [...]

Filed under: Employment law, Safety | Comments Off

If you read “business attacks ruling on holidays” in the FT today, or the Sun’s lurid “fury over sick pay ruling” you might be excused for thinking that this week’s ruling from the European Court of Justice was all about the EU bashing British business. Luckily, much of the business reaction is either spin or bunkum.

Filed under: Employment law, Working time | Comments Off

On 17 December there will be a key vote in the European Parliament on the future of the opt-outs from the 48 hour week. I’ve just heard that the ETUC has called a demonstration at the Parliament in Strasbourg on the eve of this vote (16 Dec), starting at 1.30.
Thus its time to check that the UK [...]

Filed under: Working time | Comments Off

I was saddened to read the FT story that shows that the Government still does not quite “get” the case for the Working Time Directive.
The Employment Committee of the European Parliament is meeting today to discuss a report that includes the end of the so-called individual opt-outs from the 48 hour limit on average weekly working [...]

Filed under: Work-life balance, Working time | 1 Comment »

A recent story in the Sunday Mirror reported that a senior Tory said that the minimum wage could be “allowed to wither on the vine”.
Is the story true? Well, it certainly a tactic that has been pursued  by Republican presidents in the USA. The story has not been rebutted by the Conservative Party, and the policy statements [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, Inequality, Labour market, Vulnerable workers | Comments Off

Do you need cheering up after months of reading about the world financial crisis? Would the prospect of another holiday help lift your spirits?
August bank holiday is now just a dim memory and Christmas is still too far away to start counting the days on the wall of my office. This long haul is just one of the reasons why the [...]

Filed under: Working time | 1 Comment »

Yesterday the Labour Party Conference voted to end the UK’s individual opt-outs from the Working Time Directive. Predictably, the Daily Mail reported this as a ‘lurch to the left’ . It looks to me more like a lurch towards common sense.
The 48 hour limit on average weekly working time is justified by a wealth of scientific evidence [...]

Filed under: Working time | 1 Comment »

There is no doubt that the credit crunch has squeezed most of the life out of the mortgage market, but are house prices really falling as fast as the lenders say? The answer is ‘no’, and this is because a significant minority of houses are actually bought without credit and therefore do not show up [...]

Filed under: Housing | Comments Off

The debate on flexible working and homeworking has been hotting up this week. The CBI’s Autumn Economic Statement, which was published on Monday, argues that there has been a huge increase in homeworking in recent years. However, according to the official Labour Force Survey, there has been some increase in the number of employees who can work from home [...]

Filed under: Work-life balance | Comments Off