SICKNESS DISMISSAL DEVELOPMENTS
A CROSS-OVER WITH DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION
INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES AND EC LAW
I suppose that one of the few advantages of being an employment lawyer is that things go quite quiet over the ever-expanding Christmas break and may take a little time to come back on stream afterwards, during which time the employment lawyer can make innocent fun of his colleagues in the family and divorce law division who are snowed under on the first working Monday of the year (D-Day) sorting out the devastation done to personal relationships by so many not-so-merry Christmases.
Of course, the government could be trusted to play the Scrooge act and try to wreck our peace by publishing the Employment Bill just before the break. This is the sort of state of the art law that tends to make the brain hurt, but as we stare down the barrel of yet more change in 2008 it is perhaps comforting to see in the recent case law some developments in two longstanding and immutable areas of employment law, ie in areas which (unlike age discrimination