Employment Protection

Since 1963, there has been a transformation in employment law. Until then, the rights of employees were contained almost exclusively within an individual contract of employment, with very little statutory intervention other than in the areas of health and safety and the payment of wages. However, 1963 saw the introduction of the Contracts of Employment Act, which introduced minimum notice periods and the right to written particulars, and since then various pieces of legislation have given employment protection rights which are enforced through the tribunals rather than the ordinary courts. Many of these rights, such as the right not to be unfairly dismissed and the right to redundancy payments, are discussed more fully in Chapters 9 and 10. In addition to these major rights, however, there is a variety of disparate individual rights which were created by the Employment Protection Act 1975 and the Employment Relations Act 1999, and which can now be found in the Employment Rights Act (ERA) 1996. It is these rights that the following will discuss.