THE
EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS ACT 2004
The
Employment
Relations Act 2004 achieved Royal Assent on 16th September 2004.
Measures contained in the Act will come into force in stages between October
2004 and April 2005.
Sections 37 and 38 (Role of the companion at disciplinary or grievance hearings;
Extension of jurisdiction at EAT) and sections 29 to 32 (Inducements and
detriments in respect of membership etc of independent trade unions) will come
into force on 1 October 2004. Click
here for details on these provisions. Details on commencement of the
remaining sections of the Act will be provided on this site in due course.
This page
gives a helpful summary of what is contained in the Act. The Explanatory Notes explain
in more detail the effect of individual sections in the Act, and will be
available shortly.
The Employment Relations Act 2004 is mainly concerned
with collective labour law and trade union rights.
It will implement the findings of the review of the Employment
Relations Act 1999, announced by the
Secretary of State in July 2002. The
centrepiece of the 1999 Act was the establishment of a statutory procedure for
the recognition of trade unions by employers for collective bargaining purposes.
The
review concluded that the 1999 Act is working well.
However, the review identified a number of areas where recognition
procedures could be improved and trade union law modernised.
The
review was conducted with close involvement of interested parties, and included
a full public consultation on its draft conclusions and recommendations.
The Government’s
response
(180Kb)
[Welsh
version  (165Kb)]
to that consultation
exercise sets out the findings of the review and gives a detailed analysis of
the policy behind the measures in the new Act.
What’s in the Act?
The Act contains:
- measures to tackle the intimidation of workers
during recognition and derecognition ballots by introducing rules which define
improper campaigning activity by employers and unions and by clarifying what
"reasonable access" unions have to the workers in the bargaining unit. (See
Press Notice
on 29 March 2004.);
- measures
to improve the operation of the statutory recognition procedure.
For example, it clarifies issues surrounding the determination of the
appropriate bargaining unit; clarifies the “topics”
for collective bargaining; allows unions to communicate with workers at an
earlier stage in the process, and clarifies and builds upon the current
legislation relating to the supply of information to the Central
Arbitration Committee and the Advisory
Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas);
- provisions to increase the protections against the dismissal of employees
taking official, lawfully-organised industrial action by extending the
"protected period" from 8 to 12 weeks; exempting "lock out" days from the 12
week protected period; and, defining more closely the actions which employers
and unions should undertake when taking reasonable procedural steps to resolve
industrial disputes; measures to simplify the law on industrial action ballots
and ballot notices: and
- measures
to widen the ability of unions to expel or exclude racist activists and
others whose political behaviour is incompatible with trade union
membership.
- a power for the Secretary of State to make
funds available to independent trade unions and federations of trade unions
to modernise their operations (see text of Written
Statement of 10 February 2004).
- measures
to implement the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the case of Wilson
& Palmer, which ensure that
union members have clear rights to use their union's services, and cannot be
induced by employers to relinquish essential union rights or dissuaded from
seeking union recognition;
- measures
to improve the operation of some individual employment rights such as a
clarification of the role of the companion in grievance and disciplinary
hearings; and technical changes to flexible working legislation
concerning protections from unfair dismissal;
- new
protections for employees who are dismissed or who suffer other detriment
because they are summoned or have been away from work on jury service;
- a
power to make regulations to introduce information and consultation in the
workplace (in Great Britain and Northern Ireland), by implementing the EC
Directive on Information and Consultation (Council Directive 2002/14/EC)
(52Kb).The Government consultation
(238Kb)
on the draft regulations closed on 7
November 2003. The Government's response sets out the findings of the
consultation. Please click here to
link to the Information and Consultation Directive website;
- measures
to improve the enforcement regime of the national minimum wage.
The Government published a consultation
note
(17Kb)
in August 2003,
The
Government response was published
in October 2003;
- measures
to give the Certification Officer
greater powers to strike out weak or vexatious claims;
- measures
to improve trade union regulation, and a power to allow the Secretary of
State to include non-postal methods of balloting in statutory union
elections and ballots;
If you have any enquiries
please telephone 020 7215 5000.
*The
Regulatory Impact Assessment will be available shortly.
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