Your Rights at Work

Bob Watt, Rosy Border

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135333287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In an ideal world, your working relationship with your employer would be perfect. Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong. Your Rights at Work provides you with the advice and assistance you need to put things right.

Part I

Introduction

1

The History of Employment Law

Here we set out the changes that have occurred in employment law and the ideas associated with them. If you just want to get to the nitty gritty we suggest that you skip this section.

Bryant and May’s Match Girls

Annie Besant campaigned for improved working conditions for the girls who made matches in Bryant and May’s London factory. The following article, which appeared in 1888, led to a boycott of Bryant and May’s matches and then to a successful strike, which in turn led to changes in the law – see below.

The hour for commencing work is half-past six in summer and eight in winter; work concludes at six pm. Half an hour is allowed for breakfast and an hour for dinner.

This is now unlawful under the Working Time Regulations 1998 (see p 57). Workers are entitled to place a limit on their working hours and are entitled to reasonable breaks. Young workers, although we do not deal in detail with their rights in this book, are entitled to enhanced protection under regulations derived from the EC Directive on the protection of young people at work (for reference, Council Directive 94/33/EC).

This long day of work is performed by young girls, who have to stand the whole of the time. A typical case is that of a girl of 16, a piece-worker; she earns four shillings [20p] a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who ‘earns good money, as much as eight or nine shillings a week’.

The splendid salary of four shillings is subject to deductions in the shape of fines; if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of threepence [three old pence] is inflicted; for putting ‘burnts’ – matches that have caught fire during the work – on the bench, one shilling has been forfeited, and one unhappy girl was fined two shillings and sixpence for some unknown crime. If a girl leaves four or five matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh ‘frame’, she is fined threepence, and in some departments a fine of threepence is inflicted for talking.

These would now be unlawful deductions. We set out your right to wages free from unlawful deductions in Chapter 5.

One girl was fined one shilling for letting the web twist around a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’.

You now have the right to a safe and healthy working environment (see Chapter 13).

Another, who carried out these instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless.

In these more enlightened times she would have been able to sue her employer for compensation. It is likely that the employer would be prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive.

A very bitter memory survives in the factory. Mr Theodore Bryant, to show his admiration of Mr Gladstone and the greatness of his own public spirit, bethought him to erect a statue to that eminent statesman. In order that his workgirls might have the privilege of contributing, he stopped one shilling each out of their wages,

If this was taken without the workers’ consent it would now have been an unlawful deduction (see Chapter 5).

and further deprived them of half a day’s work by closing the factory, ‘giving them a holiday’. (‘We don’t want no holidays,’ said one of the girls pathetically for, needless to say, the poorer employees of such a firm lose their wages when a holiday is ‘given’.)

You now have the right to four weeks’ paid holiday each year (see Chapter 9).

So furious were the girls at this cruel plundering, that many went to the unveiling of the statue with stones and bricks in their pockets, and I was conscious of a wish that some of those bricks had made an impression on Mr Bryant’s conscience. Later on they surrounded the statue – ‘we paid for it’, they cried savagely – shouting and yelling, and a gruesome story is told that some cut their arms and let their blood trickle on the marble paid for, in very truth, by their blood …

Annie Besant was a campaigner for safe and healthy working conditions and was instrumental in controlling the use of phosphorous in matchmaking. However, her forays into theosophy and the more unusual areas of Sanskrit literature have, rather unfortunately, given her a reputation as being somewhat eccentric. Long live eccentricity!

Charles Dickens: A Blacking Warehouse in the 1820s

Charles Dickens became one of our most famous novelists, but his education was interrupted because of family poverty. When Charles was aged 12 his father lost his job and was sent to a debtor’s prison, and young Charles had to go out to work in a factory which made blacking (shoe polish).

Mr Dickens Senior was the model for Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. Later, when the family fortunes improved, Charles was able to continue his education.

James Lambert, a relative, knowing what our domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into a blacking warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary of six shillings [30p] a week … This offer was accepted very willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking warehouse to begin my business life.

We do not deal in detail with the rights of young workers in this book, but according to Article 4 of the EC Directive on the protection of young people at work, Council Directive 94/33/EC, children are now prohibited from working save under certain clearly specified conditions. A child is, in the majority of circumstances, a person of less than 15 years of age.

The blacking warehouse was a crazy tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircases, with the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sounds of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.

You now have the right to a safe and healthy working environment. Regulation 9 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 provides that: ‘Every workplace and the furniture, furnishings and fittings therein shall be kept sufficiently clean.’

The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges on the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking, first with a piece of oil-paper and then with a piece of blue paper, to tie them round with a string, and then to clip the paper close and neat all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from the apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast … My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations that, even now I wander desolately back to that time of my life.

The depth of Charles Dickens’ despair caused by his work would almost certainly entitle him to claim against his employer if this took place today Lord Steyn’s comments in Malik v BCCI SA (In Liquidation) are apposite: ‘The relationship of master and servant has been replaced by a partnership in which the employer has taken on some of the responsibility for the physical and psychological welfare of the worker.’

These two short readings demonstrate the appalling conditions endured by workers in the past. Today’s legal framework does not permit such things, and no one should feel inhibited from using the law to secure their rights. Clearly, the legal framework did not appear overnight and we trace below some of the important landmarks along the way to the current legal protection. These ‘landmarks’ are not only legal and historical, but also conceptual. Most of today’s talk is about ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ and it is true that they are the landmarks in the modern legal and moral landscape. However, it is useful to be reminded that ‘rights’ are a very recent invention.

Early Regulation and Corporatism

Before 1867, the working relationship was regulated by the state, but in an entirely different way from that which we recognise today. The first ‘labour law’ was introduced in 1349 and was extended into the Statute of Labourers 1350. Why then? The Black Death ravaged Europe and Britain and labour was in short supply. The surviving labourers found that their work was at a premium and they could charge what they wanted for it. More worryingly for the medieval state, for the first time mobility of labour became an issue. The Statute of Labourers 1350, followed by the Statute of Artificers 1563, set up a system of price and wage control and control over labour mobility and training. The rudimentary ‘welfare state’, controlled by the Parish using the Elizabethan Poor Law, was linked into this apparatus. This system can be seen as an early form of urban corporatism in that the guilds regulated skilled labour and entry into the trade in the towns. In the countryside, labour was regulated by the magistracy. Over time, labour became more militant and legislation was passed to prevent the formation of ‘unlawful combinations’ designed to raise wages.

This regulation of the early ‘trade unions’ came to a head in the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800. The 1799 Act simply outlawed combinations either of employers or employees, whilst the Act of 1800 was far more interesting. Whilst it continued the legal ban on combinations of workers and employers, it also introduced a cheap, summary mode of resolving disputes between masters and servants by introducing arbitration proceedings. Failure to obey the decision of magistrates, who formed the final court of arbitration, could lead to imprisonment for either side. Unfortunately, it did not really work and the Act was repealed in 1824.

The years between 1800 and 1824 really saw the death of the old state-regulated system; one might say that it died in 1824, but failed to fall down until later in the century.

Between 1800 and 1824 the doctrine of ‘freedom of contract’ rose to its high p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Welcome
• Buzzwords
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Your Rights
• Part 3: Dismissal and Redundancy
• Part 4: The Employment Tribunal and the Law
• Application to an Employment Tribunal (Form IT1)
• Useful contacts
• Index