News

The TUC is calling for the minimum earnings threshold for statutory sick pay to be scrapped. This is because 1.4 million women (compared to 600,000 men) earn under the threshold of £118 per week (i.e. they work fewer than 15 hours pw at the NMW rate) and therefore get no pay at all if they are off sick. If this came into effect, how would it affect your business?

It might! There has been a recent case that looked at whether vegetarianism was a protected belief under the Equality Act. Although it is only a Tribunal Case and therefore not binding on other cases, the Conisbee v Crossley Farms Ltd. case is quite interesting.

The government has announced plans to increase the national living wage (NLW) to two-thirds of median earnings in the next five years and extend it to younger workers, although there are concerns that this could cause problems for some businesses.

It is unlikely to have escaped your attention, but mental well-being and mental health problems seem to be discussed far more than openly than they used to be - in particular in the context of the workplace.

Employees are people not robots, and when they come to work, they can't always leave their problems behind in the locker or on the coat peg; they are part of the make-up of the individual.  Even if these problems are solely personal and not work-related, they may be exacerbated by the pressures of the job they are undertaking.  Of course people will argue that life is not any more stressful than it used to be, but for others, the pace of modern life - and expectations may be greater than they can cope with.  And if you are juggling looking after young or sick children and elderly parents on top of trying to hold down a job, the strain can be enormous.

There has been a lot of discussion recently in the media about female employees suffering from the menopause, with some campaigners wanting to put in place legislation to protect women at this stage of their lives. The statistics speak for themselves with three in five working women between the ages of 45 and 55 saying it negatively impacts on them at work. The most recent government statistics indicate that women over 50 are increasingly working part time, or more flexibly, rather than retiring and as such employers can no longer avoid the subject. But how big a problem is it really?