Recent news

The government has announced that the state pension age will rise to age 68 seven years earlier than previously expected …

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The Taylor Review into modern working practices – that was commissioned by the UK Department for Business, Industrial Strategy and Employment – has come up with the recommendation for introducing a new category of “dependent contractor” who sits between employed and self-employed status …

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According to the Office for National Statistics hourly labour costs in the UK private sector rose by 1 …

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The deadline for filing annual returns concerning share options and other UK employment-related securities has been extended by the HMRC tax office from July 6th to August 24th …

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The UK deadline for statutory annual returns to the HMRC for employee share plans is July 6th …

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A ruling by the UK Employment Appeals Tribunal has reinforced existing case law and made it much harder in the future for employees to challenge restrictions on claims for backpayments in respect to the treatment of overtime hours during annual holiday periods …

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Fleet managers should make their vehicle users aware that the Road Vehicles Registration and Licensing (Amendment) Regulations 2017 came into force on May 6th …

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Although not the subject of any appeal – and therefore  formally case law – a number of UK employment tribunal cases in the last few years (Bugden & Others v London Borough of Bromley (2014) and Dunkley and others v Kostal UK Limited (2017)) have highlighted the dangers of employers seeking to by-pass collective bargaining …

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The UK government has temporarily dropped provisions in the Finance Bill concerning the tax treatment of termination payments …

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Early Brexit talks between the EU Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, and UK Prime Minister Teresa May have not gone well …

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A UK print finishing company has recently taken its case to the Employment Appeal’s Tribunal (EAT) claiming compensation for the fact that the transferor of a printing contract included misinformation about the obligation to pay Christmas bonuses …

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The fast-food restaurants group McDonald’s is rolling out an option to all of its 115,000 UK directly owned and franchisee employees to have a fixed-hours, instead of a zero-hours, contract …

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Although companies normally check the identities of those they employ there is always the possibility that someone has managed to deceive the authorities and assumed another person’s identity …

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When selecting employees for higher or specialized posts employers frequently use written tests. However, such tests may contain a hidden bias which results in certain groups not doing as well as the general population of applicants. The question is whether a test has to be proven to be discriminatory before it can be challenged by employees, or prospective employees. .

Now the UK Supreme Court has ruled that an employer can be sued if it can be shown that one group distinguished by race, colour or ethnic origins performed significantly worse on a test used to select people for jobs. There is no prior requirement to establish why the tests produces such results. 

A group of 49 employees working for the UK immigration service have been given leave by the Supreme Court to pursue their discrimination case against the Home Office. This is because in the Executive Officer examinations non-white employees have a success rate that is just 40.3% of that for white candidates. 

This case illustrates the dangers of blanket testing, although specific testing for an individual technical or linguistic skill may be defensible if it can be shown that the skill is strictly necessary for a particular job. The fact that any group performs less well than the general population in a screening test for all job applicants could, for instance, reflect the higher aspirations of a particular culture or subculture such that people with less capability seek advancement from within that group. This factor would not, however, be a likely possibility if – for instance – a group of junior executives at a particular level within a company took a common test and one group distinguished by their racial origin performed less well. This is because there is no ethnic (or other) difference in intelligence levels. However, there is a known sexual bias in intelligence tests, as women generally score higher on verbal than non-verbal tests than men.

The UK Walmart subsidiary, ASDA, has offered its 135,000 staff the opportunity to switch to a new employment contract …

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