Ian McFarland, partner at Eversheds Sutherland Belfast, writes on the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly at long last.
After nearly two years, we welcome a reformed legislative Assembly. In amongst it all, this is a significant development for employers, employees, and us lawyers alike.
Recently I wrote about how the employment laws of Northern Ireland were being left behind, as we observed developments south of the border and across the Irish Sea, but with little in the way of legislative progress here. The gap has widened since, but with cautious optimism we can now look ahead to playing catch up and modernising our legal framework to reflect developments in society and the ever-changing ways of working.
As a starting point, there remain provisions of the Employment Act (NI) 2016 that have not yet been brought into force. These include amendments to protect and grant further rights to “zero hours workers”, including to prevent a worker from being forced to work exclusively for one employer.
The 2016 Act also sought to introduce gender pay gap reporting in NI, a concept that is familiar in GB and, more recently, the Republic of Ireland. We await regulations that will set out an employer’s obligations, including the threshold (likely based on the number of employees) for mandatory reporting. What we do know, however, is that as well as gender, employers in Northern Ireland will also be required to provide statistics in relation to ethnicity and disability.
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