Workers rights for Maternity and the EU

Workers rights for Maternity and the EU

This article is a quote from the TUC’s “UK employment rights and the EU“, it relates to maternity rights and the EU acquis.

The EU Pregnant Workers Directive 1992 led to substantial improvements in the health and safety protections for expectant and new mothers in the workplace. It gave women paid time off for ante-natal appointments and placed duties on employers to assess risks and to adjust working conditions, transfer a pregnant or breastfeeding worker to alternative work or suspend them on paid leave where harm is identified.

While the maternity leave entitlement in the UK already exceeded the EU minimum of 14 weeks when the Directive was implemented, case law from the ECJ has had a positive impact in tackling the disadvantage and discrimination that many women face in the workplace when they become mothers. For example, it made clear that treating a women unfavourably because of pregnancy or maternity leave was direct sex discrimination and that it was not necessary to identify a non-pregnant comparator in similar circumstances to prove discrimination. This ended years of women potentially being defeated in discrimination claims because the employer argued that they would have treated a man who had to take a substantial period out of the workplace in a similar way.

Sex discrimination law in the UK was amended to create a separate category of pregnancy discrimination, which is now defined as unfavourable treatment because of pregnancy or maternity leave in the Equality Act 2010 with no need for any comparison with a non-pregnant employee. This change in UK law was achieved following a case taken against the UK government by the old Equal Opportunities Commission relying on EU law.

ECJ case law has also extended protection from dismissal on grounds of pregnancy or maternity leave to fixed-term workers. And, since 2008, women on additional maternity leave have had access to the same contractual rights as women on ordinary maternity leave as a result of ECJ case law. This means, for example, that employers are obliged to make contributions into occupational pension schemes for longer than the first 26 weeks of leave.

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Retweets, likes and bookmarks

Retweets, likes and bookmarks

Twitter have, it seems, changed the way and thus the semantics of the way in which we can tag ours and others tweets. One can no longer parse the history of one’s own likes but we now have bookmarks which can. Up until now, I have said that, “… comments are mine, retweets are not agreement, likes likely to mean ‘read later'”. I’d best change this.

From now my policy is “comments are mine, retweets, likes and bookmarks do not signify agreement”.

Retweets everyone can see, followers get this in the feed, and the author is notified.

Likes, the author is notified and the like count incremented.

Bookmarks  can be browsed. …

Hiring Smart

This passed me by on my LinkedIn feed. They quote Steve Jobs as saying something allegedly wise against micro-management.

I wonder when he said it because I remember saying something similar in the 1990’s (while Jobs was at Next). It’s just as well that I wasn’t blogging or asserting copyright, although I might be richer than I am if I had. (It is however, merely a corollary of the “Theory X, Theory Y” model which was first stated in the “Human Side of Enterprise” by Douglas McGregor, published in 1960, which I commented on here …. , I also comment here … and also here … ) So even I was a bit late.

I was hugely amused by the comment suggesting that Jobs didn’t actually pursue this strategy! …

And at the end

A final word about #lab18. We’ve finally got a form of accountability over our MPs through the reformed trigger ballot, we may have some unity over Brexit and have put down a marker that the Labour Party still thinks that remain might be the best anwer given the current state of negotiations and the failure to find an answer to the Irish border issue. Perhaps most importantly Corbyn’s speech as a great platform for the future, there are significant policy promises and there were non of the regrets I had on leaving the hall after one of Ed Miliband’s speeches; it just goes to show what can be done when we put our mind to it without the distractions of an unnecessary Leadership campaign.

Otherwise, you can see what I said, didn’t say and thought using the tag #lab18, or select a day view for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; the CLPD’s yellow pages can be viewed using the tag #yellowpages, which as also available as an xml feed,

ooOOOoo

Here is the Labour Party’s You Tube play list;

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Subscribe

There are various ways that you can subscribe to my content.

This is a wordpress blog, and you can thus subscribe to my blog via wordpress.com and also you can use your favourite feed reader. [+].

You can also set up an if-this-then-that rule; if {new feed} then {text yourself}, and another way of subscribing to my blog,is to set up a visualping,io alert. this would need to monitor https://davelevy.info/blog.

I now post most blog articles, including most from the LinkedIn stream to Medium; you can subscribe to my medium feed using this link. or join Medium as a referred reader. The latter option costs you money and I earn commission and so it would be helpful.

Medium membership page
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Eternal vigilance

I have been pointed at China’s Social Credit Scoring plans via two routes. The first is this extract published at Wired from Rachel Botsman’s book, “Who can we trust”. This details the Chinese Governments plan to build a social credit scoring scheme, but the sources and incentives are horrendously comprehensive, including their leading match making agency. (It’s taken me some time to read this article, an I have bookmarked and annotated it in my diigo feed.) Worrying things about the Chinese scheme is that voluntary participation becomes mandatory; while rewards and incentives are at the forefront of everyone’s mind today, control and punishment is planned, in the Chinese case in the short term they are talking about foreign and domestic travel restrictions but as I note, the countries leading dating agency is one of the surveillance agencies. There is also talk of social investment loans (helicopter money) which become available on the basis of social scores.

The second route was an article on Medium by someone who got banned from AirBnB. He pointed at an article on Buzzfeed, “A Chinese-Style Digital Dystopia Isn’t As Far Away As We Think” where a series of regulatory decisions in the USA seem to be paving the way to something similar, a powerful illustration that the argument that surveillance is OK if it’s private sector is horrendously false.

One worrying aspect of the proposed Chinese system is that your reputation is as good as that of your friends and we have idiots trying to replicate it with peeple, and reading up on that has started me worrying about Linkedin and its competitors and we all know we should get off facebook.

The wired article came before machine learning and massive scale AI became a hot topic, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to social credit scores when they let rip with the application of machine learning. The automated derivation of reputation scores also raises issues of safeguarding, libel and context. Safeguarding and libel laws require the machines to tell the truth, in fact safeguarding may require machines to hide the truth. Context requires a level of nuance that we are unsure if machines will ever have, but even if they get there, justice and judges must remain human and the code must be open; China’s & Facebook’s is not!. The GDPR gives data subjects rights, perhaps its time to revisit the seven principles.

Of course in the UK, we have our very own examples of machines and data sharing getting it wrong. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary has suspended the intra-government and some of the other immigration data sharing as a result of the backlash on the Windrush scandal. (I wonder if this I an excuse to look again at the DPA Immigration Exemption clauses.) Much of what is happening in China and the USA is also happening in the UK, it’s just that the surveillance agents are the US owned datenkraken and the British State have legalised the hacking of their data streams.

What’s happening in China is terrible, but our governments are following suit! The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. …

Deal or No Deal

I was reading my news feeds this morning and of course Brexit comes up. Richard Corbett, now the Leader of the European PLP writes that when Labour in the Commons considers the Lord’s amendments to the European Union Withdrawal Bill, while there is a lot of noise about remaining in the single market or the European Economic Area, a more important amendment might be the establishment of a parliamentary “meaningful vote”. At the moment the Government plan to offer Parliament a “Deal or No Deal” vote, the opportunity to tell them to think again or remain must be on the table.

Anthony Barnett, writes an open letter to Remainers, where the thrust of the article is to pose a new hope, probably arguing “Remain but Reform” which is something a Labour Government might realistically undertake but he points at a blog by Dominic Cummings, the former Director of “Vote Leave” who is more than a little disappointed with the progress made in negotiating Brexit. Cummings’ diatribe reflects in my mind the foolish simplicity, held by, it would seem, many Tory’s that Government’s decide and people follow.

In James Graham’s play, “This House”, possibly the central speech is between the two party deputy chief whips where they reflect on the growing split between both the Parties as butskellism ended and the growing dichotomy between the government and governed. Both Harrison and Wetherill had served in the wartime military, and both had worked outside politics; they became parliamentarians with a hinterland in the real economy and thus understood that people are complicated. The growth of the career politician has led to a fantasy understanding of how society and politics work.

During the Coalition, it seemed that they thought they could press policy buttons and it would have the effect they wanted. There was never any plan as to what would happen if the great unwashed masses misbehaved, as we always will. It’s the result of apprenticeships formed in the student movement and the advancement of sea lawyers with no experience of real life, and often little connection with their electorates.

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What’s a (LP) conference delegate do?

What’s a (LP) conference delegate do?

You need to be in the conference room for the debates (and votes). It runs from Sunday through to Wednesday lunch and ends with the Leader’s speech. It is likely that Woman’s Conference will be on the preceding Saturday. The most important task is to represent your members by voting on motions, rule changes, reports from the NEC, Officers and the National Policy Forum and in elections because some elections are still conducted at conference. Since a delegation is responsible for representing the organisation that sent it, it is expected that the delegation should vote together …

Advantage

I came across this article in the New Statesman, called, “The Bennites’ revenge: how Jeremy Corbyn and his allies survived political exile”, and what fascinated me is the statement that Blair and David Miliband’s failure to aggressively support the social democratic tendencies and projects of the EU are one of the foundations of the failure to vote remain in the referendum.

The author, Prof. Jeremy Gilbert also looks at the US’s journey from supporting Social Democracy as a weapon against the radicalisation of the working class in western Europe during the cold war to Reagan’s initiating of the neoliberal world order after the fall of the wall and the Soviet Union. He also tracks the politics/media nexus amongst both Labour and Tories arguing that the right invented the threat of the federal super state to copy the US’s neo-con politics of insurgency.

His central argument is that Corbyn and his close allies are recognisably free from the US’s “Special Relationship” and the malign influence of the UK’s right wing press. Today this is an advantage,

It;s a great read and I am now following him on feedly and academi.edu; on his blog he points at a Compass Project, a podcast series, that he was involved in called a Beginners Guide to the Labour Party. …