At last! Ian Smith brings clarity & some common sense to working hours, terms & divisions
- Statutory rights for agency workers.
- Employer knowledge and opinion.
- Division, practice & procedure.
Clarification is the name of the game in the three cases covered in this update:
(i) that an agency worker’s statutory rights to (certain) equal terms cannot be bought out by paying a higher hourly rate (but also that the phrase ‘duration of working time’ does not mean that the agency worker must be hired to work the same number of hours as a permanent worker);
(ii) that an employer in a disability case may reasonably rely on advice from an occupational health or other similar department, as long as it does not just rubber stamp it; and
(iii) that a contract action brought before a tribunal under the Extension of Jurisdiction Order must be against the employer itself, not some other party. In a sense, all of these seem fairly obvious but, although the decisions all come down on that common sense side, the arguments in them show
