Smith & Wood's Employment Law

Smith & Wood’s Employment Law draws on the extensive teaching and practical experience of its authors to provide students with a clear explanation of essential legislation and case detail while also offering incisive academic commentary and critical detail to help with essay preparation and class work. Throughout the book, topics are carefully explained in their social and historical context, providing readers with an insight into the fast-paced development of employment law and offering perceptive analysis of its future direction. This fourteenth edition has been produced against the background of the 2015 and 2017 elections and of course with the largest elephant in the room of the result of the referendum on membership of the EU. The meaning of the latter remains a matter of almost complete uncertainty even t the time of writing two years later, and indeed is likely to remain so for much of the currency of this edition, but where appropriate it contains speculation as to possible effects. At the opposite end of the spectrum, this edition also contains the up-to-date case law on detailed employment law developments such as ACAS early conciliation, whistleblowing, discrimination law across all the forms of protected characteristics, and the whole question of the effect of modern phenomena such as social media use on traditional areas of employment law. On the collective level, this edition includes a consideration of the impact of the Trade Union Act 2016 on the calling of industrial action, picketing and time off for union activites and the latest decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, the EFTA Court and the UK courts on the impact of human rights law and of EU economic freedoms on collective labour law, in particular in relation to union recognition for bargaining and in relation to the banning of industrial action. It also considers whether the 2018 amendments to the Posted Workers Directive have any impact on the legality of any industrial action which affects the EU freedom to provide services across the boundaries of member states. More generally, it examines the extent to which workers and unions have legal protection for collective action relating to members of the gig economy Finally, the changes to the style and layout of the book adopted in the last edition have been maintained, in order to aid accessibility for the reader, given the ever-increasing complexity of the law itself here.