UK

UK Government Seeks to Reassure Workers, Businesses Over No-Deal Brexit
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Aug 31, 2018 - 4:39pm
UK Government Seeks to Reassure Workers, Businesses Over No-Deal Brexit
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The March 2019 deadline for negotiating terms for the UK’s departure from the European Union is fast approaching, while major points of contention between London and Brussels still remain to be ironed out. While the likelihood of a “no-deal” Brexit, in which the UK would crash out of the EU with no special trade arrangements, is generally considered low, the final outcome remains uncertain with just six months to go, so British companies like London-based financial firms have been taking steps to prepare for that contingency. At the same time, European manufacturers operating in the UK have made clear that they might have to pull out of the country if the deadline passes without a deal, as the removal of the UK from the European customs union would be hugely disruptive to their supply chains.

At the same time, Europeans already living legally in the UK have been assured that they will be allowed to remain under any deal, but it is less clear what will happen to them if there is no deal. Trade unions and other labor groups have also expressed concern that Brexit could mean a reduction in the rights employees enjoy under labor laws grounded in EU policies. The bill drafted last year for removing the UK from the legal, political, and financial institutions of the EU preserves regulations derived from European labor laws, but employee advocates still fear that a weakening of these rights is in the pipeline; the possibility of a no-deal outcome compounds those suspicions.

In the past week, the government has issued several statements meant to reassure employees and employers that a no-deal Brexit remains unlikely and will have no such dire consequences if it does occur. A guidance document issued last week as part of a series of advice papers concerning a potential no-deal Brexit addressed the issue of workers’ rights, saying there would be no change to these protections in any event, Personnel Today reported:

[T]he government said domestic legislation already exceeds the level of employment protection provided under EU law. It intends to make small amendments to the language of workplace legislation to reflect that the UK will no longer be a member of the EU. No policy changes will be made.

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Survey: Most UK Workers Aren’t Working 9-to-5, and Most Don’t Want to
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Aug 23, 2018 - 4:16pm
Survey: Most UK Workers Aren’t Working 9-to-5, and Most Don’t Want to
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A new poll from YouGov has found that just 6 percent of employees in the UK are working traditional 9-to-5 hours, while only 14 percent said they would prefer to work those hours, Personnel Today reported on Tuesday:

The survey, commissioned by Blue Rubicon and McDonald’s, asked more than 4,000 adults for their views on working hours and found that most full-time workers preferred to start earlier and leave earlier: 8am to 4pm were the most popular hours for 37% of respondents while 21% chose 7am to 3pm.

Just under four in 10 respondents (42%) were already working according to shift patterns, compressed hours and job shares and many of these people told researchers that they felt more motivated than when in fixed-time work and being able to work flexible hours led them to stay in the job longer.

The desire to work more flexibly in future was expressed by 70% of respondents, with 65% adding it would improve their wellbeing and satisfaction at work. However, a third of people said they didn’t think their employer would allow them to work more flexibly. Just under half (48%) said they would prefer to work a longer day in return for a shorter working week.

Evidence that traditional work schedules are becoming obsolete has been accumulating for a few years now, and not only in the UK: A CareerBuilder survey in the US in 2016, for example, found 59 percent of US workers saying they believed the typical 9-to-5 workday was a thing of the past. Work-life balance is also an increasingly important driver of talent attraction and retention around the world, as our research at Gartner has found.

At People Management, HR experts at the CIPD underscored that the survey’s findings reflect a need for organizations to be more attentive to employees’ needs in managing schedules and designing the workweek:

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UK Labor Market Tightens as Europeans Leave, but Wages Remain Stagnant
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Aug 15, 2018 - 5:00pm
UK Labor Market Tightens as Europeans Leave, but Wages Remain Stagnant
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The latest labor market bulletin from the UK Office for National Statistics, released on Tuesday, shows that the number of citizens of other EU countries working in the UK has declined in the past year by the largest amount since the government began collecting comparable records two decades ago. Between April and June 2018, approximately 2.28 million EU nationals were employed in the country: 86,000 fewer than in the second quarter of 2017. In the same period, the number of employed UK nationals increased by 332,000 to 28.76 million, while the number of non-EU foreign workers increased by 74,000 to 1.27 million.

Gerwyn Davies, senior labour market analyst at the CIPD, comments on the report to Personnel Today:

“Today’s figures confirm that the UK labour market has suffered from a ‘supply shock’ of fewer EU-born workers coming to live and work in the UK during the past year, compared with previous years. This has contributed to labour supply failing to keep pace with the strong demand for workers; which is consistent with another welcome fall in unemployment.” …

“The tightening labour market is putting modest upward pressure on pay, but this still isn’t leading to more widespread pressure due to ongoing weak productivity,” said Davies.

New employer survey data released on Monday by the CIPD and the recruitment firm Adecco showed that UK employers were experiencing staff shortages due to the low-unemployment environment and a decline in migration from the EU. The survey found that the number of applicants per vacancy had dropped across all roles since last summer, while 66 percent of employers said at least some of their vacancies were proving difficult to fill.

Nonetheless, this tight labor market isn’t translating into higher wages for most UK employees.

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Barclays Shifting European Business to Ireland in Anticipation of Brexit
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Aug 13, 2018 - 3:14pm
Barclays Shifting European Business to Ireland in Anticipation of Brexit
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Barclays is taking direct ownership of its French, German, and Spanish branches away from its UK company and putting them under control of Barclays Bank Ireland, Reuters reported on Monday. The move by the UK-based international bank to expand its Irish entity, which it announced last year would become its post-Brexit European headquarters, is part of its contingency plans for ensuring the smooth continuation of its European operations after Brexit.

Barclays plans to ultimately move all of its European branches under the aegis of the Irish bank. These include corporate and investment banking businesses in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands, according to Reuters. After absorbing these businesses, Barclays Bank Ireland will have total assets of around £224 billion (250 billion euros, or $286 billion), which the Irish Times reports would make it the largest bank in Ireland.

These entities will ultimately remain under the ownership of Barclays’ holding company in London, but will be directly owned by the Irish bank. This is meant to ensure that even in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit, in which the UK crashes out of the European Union with no special trade arrangements, Barclays will be able to continue serving EU customers without disruption as its businesses will still be based in a member state.

It is not clear what impact these moves will have in terms of jobs, though the Irish Times notes that the bank had already outlined plans to add up to 200 new employees in Ireland; overall, Brexit-related reorganizations at banks are expected to result in tens of thousands of jobs disappearing from the City of London.

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UK MPs Press for More Gender Pay Gap Disclosures, Action Plans
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Aug 6, 2018 - 1:02pm
UK MPs Press for More Gender Pay Gap Disclosures, Action Plans
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In April 2017, new regulations came into effect in the UK requiring all organizations with 250 or more employees to publish their gender pay gaps. One year later, the first round of mandatory reports showed that the median pay gap among those reporting stood at 9.7 percent, with 78 percent of firms paying men more than women. On a more granular level, the reports illustrated the great degree to which women’s underrepresentation in senior roles, especially those with high bonus potential, contributes to the pay gap in professional fields.

Now, a committee of MPs is urging the government to expand the reporting mandate to smaller firms, as well as to require companies to publish their plans for closing these gaps, the Guardian reported last week:

All companies with more than 50 employees should have to report their gender pay gap from 2020, said the business, energy and industrial strategy committee (BEIS). Currently only firms with more than 250 employees have to report their gender pay gap, leaving half of the UK workforce without knowledge of their workplace’s gap. The committee said the government had to take fresh action to close the gap, and should force companies to publish action plans and narrative reports about what they were doing to narrow it.

It also criticised the government for “failing to clarify the legal sanctions available to the EHRC [Equalities and Human Rights Commission] to pursue those failing to comply and we recommend that the government rectifies this error at the next opportunity”.

The committee called out those companies that excluded partner pay from their pay gap reports, including many of London’s major law firms, which its chair Rachel Reeves said “made a mockery of the system.”

Laura Hinton, chief people officer at PwC, told the committee that it was time for British businesses to start thinking about gender pay equity as more than just a compliance concern and couple their pay gap reporting with concrete action plans and accountability. The committee is proposing that boards of directors introduce key performance indicators for reducing pay gaps and that remuneration committees be required to explain how their pay policy decisions reflect their commitment to pay equity, according to Personnel Today.

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UK Employees Taking Fewer Sick Days May Point to Presenteeism
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Aug 1, 2018 - 4:32pm
UK Employees Taking Fewer Sick Days May Point to Presenteeism
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New government data from the UK indicates that employees there are taking sick days off work at a historically low rate, Workplace Insight’s Neil Franklin reports:

A new report from the Office for National Statistics suggests that the number of sickness days taken by UK workers has almost halved over the past two decades to reach a record low. It dropped from an average of 7.2 days in 1993 to 4.1 days in 2017, and had been steadily falling since 1999. The total days lost for all workers last year was 131.2 million, down from 137.3 million in 2016 and 178.3 million in 1993. Since the recession, sickness absence rates have declined by 0.5 percentage points to 1.9 per cent last year. The reasons are not explored in the report but one possible explanation would be the growing number of people prepared to work when they should really take time off.

A report published in May by the CIPD and SimplyHealth on the state of health and wellbeing in the UK workplace found that presenteeism (workers showing up to work even when sick) was a growing problem, with 86 percent of employers saying they had seen staff come into work while sick over the previous year. That marked a significant increase from 72 percent in 2016 and just 26 percent in 2010, yet the same survey found that only a quarter of organizations that had seen signs of presenteeism had taken steps to mitigate it. The CIPD/SimplyHealth report also found that many employees were working while they were supposed to be on vacation, while other recent studies have suggested that many full-time UK employees aren’t taking the full paid leave benefit to which they are entitled.

Presenteeism could well be a factor in the trend identified by the ONS, Rachel Suff, senior employment relations adviser at the CIPD, told Ashleigh Wight at Personnel Today.

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TUC: Over 1 Million UK Employees Not Getting Any Paid Leave
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Jul 31, 2018 - 10:08am
TUC: Over 1 Million UK Employees Not Getting Any Paid Leave
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A new analysis from the Trades Union Congress finds that one in 12 employees in the UK are not receiving the full amount of annual paid leave to which they are entitled by law, while 1.2 million are not getting any paid leave at all. Adam McCulloch highlights the repot at Personnel Today:

Agriculture (14.9%) was the sector where the highest proportion of workers was likely to miss out and retail was where the highest number of staff were losing out (348,000 people). … Employees are entitled to 28 days’ annual leave (pro rata) including public holidays but, according to the unions body, unrealistic workloads, managers failing to agree time off and a failure by businesses to keep up with the law was behind the high numbers losing out.

The TUC is urging HMRC to be given powers to clamp down on employers who deny staff their statutory holiday entitlement. This would include the power to ensure that workers are fully compensated for missed holidays.

The TUC report comes just a few months after a Glassdoor survey came out showing that only 43 percent of UK employees were using more than 90 percent of their holiday entitlement, while another 40 percent were using less than half of it. The TUC analysis was based on unpublished data from the Labour Force Survey conducted by the UK’s Office of National Statistics; Glassdoor’s figures came from a 2,000-person online survey carried out in April.

Whereas the Glassdoor survey focused on whether employees were using their leave entitlement, the TUC is more concerned with whether some employers are denying their workers the right to use it. “Employers have no excuse for robbing staff of their well-earned leave. UK workers put in billions of hours of unpaid overtime as it is, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said. “The government must toughen up enforcement to stop bosses cheating staff out of their leave.“

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