Law Donut blog

2010 has come round pretty fast, and business owners are getting ready to deal with workers’ requests for time off to watch World Cup matches on TV – or even go to South Africa. Can you remember all the legal rules about holidays?

The bottom line is that workers are entitled to 28 days’ paid holiday each year (a pro-rata proportion for part-timers and temps), and entitlement starts from day one of their employment. But job contracts and policies may allow your staff to carry holiday forward in some circumstances, and new case law says sick workers have the right to carry holiday forward in some circumstances, so some employees may be entitled to more than 28 days.

Contracts or policies can limit when employees can take holiday – provided they have taken their 28 days by the end of the holiday year. For example, employers may be able to insist they take part of their holiday on bank holidays and/or during an annual summer close-down, and stop them from taking holiday during peak periods or when the firm would otherwise be short-staffed – proper, objective grounds. Think about emailing employees to remind them when you can refuse holiday requests. Some employers also set limits on how long each holiday can be – for example, that no holiday can last more than a fortnight.

Contracts or policies may set out how much notice employees must give you of their holiday plans. If not, the notice an employee gives has to be twice as long as the holiday they are asking for. So two days’ holiday requires four days’ notice.

If an employer refuses proposed holiday dates they have to do so in writing, and the length of notice of the refusal must be at least as long as the holiday requested – for example, at least two weeks before the worker’s holiday is due to start if refusing a two-week holiday.

Employers often have a system for determining priority if there are holiday clashes or if they’d otherwise be left short-staffed. This needs to be fair and non- discriminatory system, which can be as simple as ‘first come, first served’. Favouring employees with longer service could discriminate against younger employees who have not had time to build up service, and may also be sex discrimination because (on average) women have shorter periods of service than men.

That’s holidays sorted – but how do you stop workers just calling in sick on their country’s match days – a particular problem with this World Cup because South Africa and the UK are on similar time zones, so matches will be on during the working day? Answers on a World Cup ticket please!

Radio 4’s Today programme recently offered us the thought that our problem with the UK ’s workforce is that too many employment laws are driven by high-falutin’ ideology rather than evidence they achieve what we want.

I don’t care what each new bit of legislation says, or why it was dreamed up, as long as it actually delivers what we want it to. At the moment, some of our HR laws don’t.

Take maternity rights as an example. I’m a liberal, so I believe that (a) the best candidate should get the job and (b) for most jobs, sex is irrelevant. That’s better for business, better for women and better for society in general. So I agree with the Government that our laws should put women and men on an equal footing.

Maybe maternity rights that give mothers a significant period of leave, some of it paid, and then give them the right to their job back, are achieving that. If, as the Government proposes, increasing the mums’ period of paid leave will achieve more equality, three cheers – go for it!

But are these new policies really achieving that? I hear stories that employers sometimes reject a female applicant for a job, or fail to promote a woman when, on merit, she is the best person for the job. Bosses keep the reasons under wraps but actually it’s because she is young, in a relationship, and may go off and have babies.

I hear that, if we look at how women fare in the UK workplace compared to some other countries, many other places are more meritocratic than we are. I also hear that in some of those countries women have fewer maternity rights.

Does that mean that the fewer rights women have, the more likely they are to be treated better when it comes to recruitment and promotion? Or would we find that those countries are actually more meritocratic because social norms are different there, their country’s richer than ours, or because the demographics in that country mean women are bound to do better in the workplace? I, for one, don’t know.

My big worry is that our politicians don’t know either. My even bigger worry is that – policy evaluations notwithstanding – they don’t seem to want to find out. Instead, they seem hung up on the belief that to make people more equal, you just keep giving some of them more rights. Faced with possible evidence that this may be counter-productive – that, say, giving women more rights may not actually benefit them, or their employers – they don’t stop and reflect enough. They just plough on – and maybe move the goalposts so it doesn’t look so obvious that it isn’t working.

Maternity rights seem a ripe candidate for a proper, rigorous evidence-based approach. Ideas anyone?