Accentism – the Latest Workplace Discrimination Issue?

Employers currently have a duty to protect workers from harassment and victimisation that is based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or age. Now there is a suggestion that accents should be added to that list.

A study by the University of Manchester found that many people feel pressured to change their speech patterns while at work. Dr Alex Baratta, who conducted the study with students said, “Clearly, most people modify their accent not because they lack pride in it, quite the opposite in fact. It's actually because they fear the negative perceptions others might have of them if they don't.”

High Profile Examples

This is borne out by the example of a teacher interviewed for the research who revealed that he had been told by an Ofsted inspector to sound more southern while working in a school in Berkshire. Steph McGovern is a business journalist working for the BBC. She also has a northern accent and has said that colleagues treated her as "too common for telly" because of her accent. She wrote in the Radio Times that she didn’t get promoted because of the way she spoke.

Why it Matters

While some people can change the way they speak quite happily, for others it can cause distress. Dr Baratta said that while playing down their regional accents is a common practice, “we should not assume that it is accepted by all speakers without issue. As part of my ongoing research, many participants see accent modification as synonymous with selling out and a clear threat to their sense of self.” You can read more about Dr Baratta’s research on his specially set up website here.

Other academics have pointed out that dialect helps people to feel they belong in their communities. It is becoming more popular rather than less. Dr Baratta insists that "Any form of discrimination, including accentism, shouldn't be tolerated in an inclusive society."

In anticipation of any change in the law, you and your team could take care that the accents of interviewees are not considered while recruiting, and that all staff are aware that accentism will not be tolerated. Your local bookkeepers could also be keeping an eye on this area and may volunteer information on developments as they arise to ensure you stay up to date.

An Employer’s Guide to Brexit

Following the Brexit referendum there is some disquiet and anxiety in the working world of the UK. Some employees from EU countries are worried about whether they will be able to remain in their jobs here and some even feel unwelcome. The wave of hate crime in the streets has reinforced that feeling.

What Employers Can Do

Of course it could easily translate into the workplace. Employers need to be on the lookout for any harassment or unfair treatment as they have a duty to protect their staff members from it in compliance with discrimination legislation. It’s worth considering whether your employees need a reminder of your policies to keep to these rules.

If you have recruited from across the EU to fill job needs that couldn’t be filled locally, you may be concerned about the future too. Now is the time to start thinking about how you can manage without them by attracting more local people, perhaps by setting up apprenticeships and training schemes. Always remember, though, that you may not currently discriminate on the basis of nationality when recruiting new personnel.

Meanwhile you might look at ways to help your EU staff protect their status. If they have been here for over five years, they may be eligible to apply for naturalisation, and become a British national, or try for indefinite leave to remain. All the relevant information and documentation is available on the Immigration Direct website.

What Might or Might not Change

Any changes will not happen overnight. Those that might change include the ones introduced by recent EU case law, since the European Court of Justice will not have any power in the UK once we leave the EU. Currently these are the calculation of holiday pay to include the elements of overtime and commission, and accruing holiday pay while on sick leave. The 48 hour limit on the working week is an EU Directive that has not proved popular in the UK, as are the relatively new Agency Worker Regulations, so it’s also possible that they may be changed in time.

Employees may be happy to note that no changes are expected to holiday entitlement, since the UK currently allows 5.6 weeks per year, while the European entitlement is only 4 weeks. Family friendly rights and flexible working is another popular element of employment law that is unlikely to change. The Equality Act 2010 is expected to remain intact as well.

Communicating with your Personnel

You should, of course, reassure staff that there will be no immediate changes. Devising a way of updating them as new information becomes available will be crucial. However you do it, you should never include speculation or opinion, especially political. You do need to act immediately whenever some new development hits the news and social media.

The fastest way will be available to a business with an intranet which can have a page devoted to these developments. Notice boards can set them out as well, or you could have regular meetings. Your local bookkeepers may be able to suggest various other ways of cascading the information swiftly through the organisation.

Holiday Pay Must Include Results Based Commission Says New Ruling

While the business community awaits the results of the Brexit deliberations of the UK government, of course, EU Law continues to influence the rulings of UK judges. A recent judgement in the Court of Appeal could have serious implications for any business that has employees on commission schemes.

A Claim for Wrongly Calculated Holiday Pay

A sales person employed by British Gas had claimed that his holiday pay had been wrongly calculated because it did not include an amount for commission that he would have earned if he had worked during the period of his holiday. Normally his commission represented about 60% of his income so the holiday pay was considerably short of his normal take home pay.

The case had earlier gone to the European Court of Justice which had rejected the claim by British Gas that his holiday pay was comparable to his normal earnings. The court reached this conclusion even though the commission scheme document was separate and not included in the employee’s contract of employment. EU case law requires holiday pay to include “all elements of normal pay”. 

When the employer took the case to the Court of Appeal, their lordships considered whether the UK Working Time Regulations 1998 should take account of this EU case law, and concluded that it should. The worker’s results-based commission was an element of his normal pay and should therefore be included in his holiday pay calculation.

The Financial Implications

Unless this ruling can be overturned, most of the British Gas 1000 plus sales staff could bring similar claims, resulting in a serious number of back payments from the company. Future holiday pay calculations will have to be correctly made to include amounts for normal commission even though they cannot be earned while their recipients are not working.

Small businesses are not exempt from this ruling and all organisations operating commission schemes should take note. However it doesn’t apply to other incentive schemes such as discretionary bonuses based on a high level of the performance of teams or on individual achievement. It could be worth discussing the matter with your local bookkeepers to ensure that you reward your employees in ways that are appropriate and will not adversely affect your bottom line.

How to Patent Your Invention

If you believe an idea or invention you are working on will take off and be valuable to you, you need to protect it as your intellectual property. The way to do this might be via trademarks, design rights or binding non-disclosure agreements or you might decide to apply for a patent.

If you choose to go down the patent route, the sooner you begin the better, because it can be a long, drawn-out process. You would be wise to take on a patent agent so that you won’t make any mistakes in this process, which would be time-consuming and even more expensive than the average spend of around £5000 on an application.

The Process of Gaining a UK Patent

Initially, you must acquire an application form from the patent office, to be submitted with your full name and address, and a description of the product you wish to patent. Then you will have up to 12 months from the filing date of your application in which it will remain valid and you can continue. While this may seem a long time, you may need it for fine tuning and making manufacturing arrangements; even setting up the funding you need can take a while.

Your application can only go through to the next stage if you pay the search fee and file claims that properly define your invention. At this stage, a Patent Officer will search for anything similar that might be available to ascertain whether it is truly unique. The product must also be something that is new, useful and non-obvious. After that you can publish your application and all the technical details of the product.

The Patent Office then conducts a full examination with the benefit of the results of the search. If everything is satisfactory, you will be granted your patent. It might be four to five years from your initial application.

How the Patent Protects your Invention

Your patent will be granted in this country for a limited number of years, provided that you make the required regular payments to maintain it. It will make it illegal during that time for anyone else to make, sell or import the product, or copies of it. If anyone infringes the patent, you can bring a civil law suit against them, get an injunction to stop them, and claim compensation.

What your patent will not do is make money from the product. If the invention won’t do that for you there is little point in patenting it. If you want to talk this through with someone independent who won’t give away your intellectual property secrets, why not discuss it in the first instance with your local bookkeepers. Sometimes a listening ear is all that is needed, or they may be able to recommend someone who will help.

How to Deal with Reference Requests

When an employee gives you notice that they will be leaving at the end of the term specified in their contract of employment, you know that they will probably be requesting that you give them a written reference to pass to their new employer. You may also receive reference requests for past employees from their new employer.

You may think this is a perfectly natural request that you can easily fulfil, but there are some pitfalls to be avoided, as well as legal implications. Occasionally you may get such a request from a landlord or a bank considering issuing a loan or setting up a new account. Apart from a few exceptions in specific industries, you are not obliged in law to give references and are free to have a policy of not doing so. In this way you cannot be accused of unfair treatment of an individual if you refuse to give them a reference.

Wanting to be Helpful

However, you may prefer to be helpful to employees wishing to move forward with their careers by writing a reference for them. If you do so, make sure it is fair and accurate. Otherwise, if the impression you give is misleading in any way, you could be in trouble down the line. You can include a disclaimer of liability for any errors, but this would not always help if a former or current employee or someone else decides to take legal action.

Getting Agreement from the Employee

You must never issue a reference to a third party unless the employee has agreed. This is because it will inevitably contain some personal information and details the individual may wish to withhold. You could be in breach of the Data Protection Act if you release this information without the consent of the person concerned.

If the reference request enquires about the mental and/or physical health of the individual, you also need to get their explicit consent to divulge it. It’s best to get this in writing as evidence in case it should be needed later. Even if you are asked to state a number of absence days without giving reasons for it, you risk a claim for disability discrimination.

Sometimes an employee with whom you have been in dispute will have made a settlement agreement with you, and it may have set out the wording for a reference to be given.

Finally, your local bookkeepers would advise you that it is usually wise to send a reference to a specific addressee, rather than ‘to whom it may concern’. If it were to fall into unscrupulous hands there could be further trouble for you.

Insurance Act Now in Force, What Businesses Need to Know

The Insurance Act 2015 came into force on 12 August 2016. It is intended to make for a fairer balance of interests between the insured and the insurer.

Applying mainly to non-consumer policies where the insured is an organisation rather than an individual, it extends the requirements of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 even further by ordering that you have a duty of disclosure of material circumstances that you know, plus what you ought to know. At the very least you must declare enough information to let the insurers know they need to make their own enquiries.

What you Need to Know

This means you need to make efforts to find out all the possible risks that you need to disclose, and you should keep comprehensive records of this research, what it has revealed and where you acquired it. Often the knowledge you need doesn’t lie with just one person. Any member of your senior management team may be privy to it, also your risk managers and anyone else responsible for the company’s insurance, including external sources such as an insurance broker. To a lesser extent, this applies to individuals as well.

Disclosures must be clear, structured and relevant. You can’t just dump a load of documents on the insurers for them to sift through and find what is pertinent. Unless your presentation is indexed and signposted in a coherent structure, it will not be considered adequate. Nor should it be too brief, vague or ambiguous, as is pointed out in the Explanatory notes to the Act.

Permitted Penalties of Non-compliance

If you fail to find out and disclose what you should have found out through diligent research, insurers can penalise you in specific ways. If anything is proven to be deliberately misrepresented, the insurer can avoid the policy so that it is ineffective. It is unlikely that you will receive a refund on your premium.

If the misrepresentation is found not to be deliberate, and you can produce evidence that you tried to ascertain the facts that have since come to light, the insurer has options based on the situation as follows:

·         If it can prove that the policy would not have been issued at all if the facts had been known at the time, it can avoid the policy and refuse the claims, but the premium must be repaid.

·         If the risk would have been accepted and a policy written with different terms, the contract should continue as if those terms were included.

·         If the premium would have been higher, claim settlements can be reduced by an appropriate proportion.

Complying with Warranties

Some insurance contracts depend on action that you agreed to undertake at the time they were written, such as changing or adding locks or alarms. The law regarding non-compliance on this has now changed so that insurers can no longer cancel the policy completely and avoid any claims, but only suspend the policy when the breach of the warranty is discovered until you fulfil the requirements. You will then still be insured under the same policy. It will, of course, be advisable to document proof of compliance with the warranty with relevant dates noted.

Wise small business owners will want to be confident that they have the right evidence in place regarding both their disclosures and their warranties. You can always turn to your local bookkeepers for help on these issues. They will be delighted to give you the benefit of their experience with helpful advice and support.

New Immigration Act Rules Now in Force

On 12 July 2016 new legislation on employing illegal workers came into force. According to the Immigration Act 2016, if a worker is found to be in the UK illegally, the government no longer has to prove that the employer knew about it. If this were to happen in your business, you could be prosecuted if you had ‘reasonable cause to believe that the employee is disqualified from employment’ because of being in the country illegally.

New Powers and Penalties

The Act also gives Immigration Officers the power to search your premises, and seize any incriminating evidence of this kind of wrong doing. It doesn’t matter whether the work is being performed under a written contract or just an oral one; the offence of employing an illegal immigrant is the same.

Penalties are more severe as well. Fines are heavy and you could go to prison for up to five years. Previously the maximum custodial sentence was two years. The workers themselves can now be prosecuted as well, and face imprisonment for up to six months.

Enforcing Worker Standards

The Act is also concerned about the conditions of legally employed workers. A new post of Director of Labour Market Enforcement has been created, whose role is to oversee the enforcement of the national minimum wage and other minimum standards for workers.

With all these new rules upon us, all employers need to be even more vigilant with their recruiting practices. If you are not 100% certain of their legal status, it’s not worth taking them on.

What Else Is to Come?

Other aspects of the Act have yet to come into force, and have no projected date as yet, but are worth noting and looking out for.

These are:

·         A power to close down premises for a maximum of 48 hours if illegal immigrants are found working there

·         A new rule that public sector workers who deal directly with the public must be fluent in English. In Wales the rule also includes the Welsh language

·         An immigration skills charge which will be imposed on employers who sponsor Tier 2 skilled migrant workers i.e. if you want to offer a job to someone from overseas with skills you cannot find otherwise.

You might want to ask your local bookkeepers to watch out for the enforcement dates of those regulations to come. They will be delighted to help keep you up to date.