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2021 marks the start of a new era for the UK, the Brexit transition period having ended at 11pm on 31 December 2020. After endless rounds of negotiation, the parties reached a last-minute agreement over the ongoing relationship between the UK and EU, and the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (which gives legal effect in the UK to the agreements reached) received royal assent on 30 December 2020. But what impact does this have on UK employment rights derived from the EU?

The short answer is that while Brexit provides the UK with some freedom to deviate from EU derived employment law, we should not expect to see any radical changes to UK employment laws or employment rights.

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement reached between the UK and EU incorporates level playing field commitments that seek to prevent either the UK or the EU gaining a competitive advantage in a variety of contexts. These include rights at work, namely fair working conditions, employment standards (including in respect of workplace health and safety), information and consultation rights and the restructuring of undertakings. The commitments given by both the UK and EU are intended to ensure that neither will weaken or reduce labour or social rights and standards below the levels in place at the end of the transition period where this affects trade or investment between the UK and EU, including by way of a failure to enforce those laws and standards.
Continue Reading Implications of Brexit for UK employment law

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has recently decided that the Working Time Directive (WTD) imposes an obligation on employers in all EU member states to record all working time, not just excess hours or overtime. This marks a significant departure from standard practice and may mean that employers will, in future, be required to implement systems that record workers’ time.

Background

In Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras, the ECJ considered the provisions concerning rest periods and the weekly working hours limit under the WTD. In this case, a number of trade unions brought a group action against the employer, seeking to obtain a declaration that the employer was under an obligation to set up a system recording the actual amount of time worked each day. This system should, the claimants argued, make it possible to check that the working times laid down in legislation and collective agreements were properly adhered to. The employer did not have such a system in place, but it did operate a computer application that enabled whole-day absences to be recorded without measuring the duration of time worked by each worker or the number of overtime hours worked.

Article 3 WTD provides for a minimum period of daily rest (11 hours in any 24-hour period) while Article 5 provides for a minimum period of weekly rest (24 hours per period of seven days). The WTD also contains an upper limit of 48 hours for the average working time for each seven-day period, although UK employees can opt-out of this limit by written agreement.

The ECJ was asked to consider whether national Spanish law (which did not require every hour to be recorded) was sufficient to ensure the effectiveness of the working time limits laid out in the WTD, and if not, whether employers should be required to establish systems whereby the actual daily working time worked by full time employees is recorded.…

Continue Reading Recording working time: do changes lie ahead?