By John Bowers QC
Publisher: Blackstone Press
Price: £35
Employment practitioners, HR personnel and students alike will all welcome the 5th edition of Bowers on Employment Law, written by John Bowers QC. It contains the law up to and including 8 February, 2000, and a new edition could hardly have been more timely. The list of statutory, political and social changes since the last edition are too numerous to mention as well as the ever-growing volume of case law. This edition deals with all the major changes to individual and collective employment law since 1997.
Loose-leafed serviced text books do not suffer the problem of dating as paperback versions do, but when is it a good time to publish an updated edition? As a result, the author deals with the case of Haddon v Van Den Bergh Foods under the topic of fairness in unfair dismissal but does not get an opportunity to comment on Midland Bank Plc v Madden or the subsequent case of Post Office v Foley. At the time of writing the author only had the draft Regulations which had been issued to implement the Part-Time Workers’ Directive but by the publication date these are now in place. Similarly, there is little comment on human rights and indeed no mention of this in the index.
These minor gripes apart, the text book
is an admirable guide to most employment topics, from the status of an employee and the background to organised labour through to strikes and picketing.
Nearly a quarter of the book is taken up with dismissal and redundancy which are still perhaps the most important aspects of employment protection legislation. According to the statistics the author claims less than 1% of employees leaving their jobs make an unfair
dismissal claim and only 1 in 100 firms with fewer than 200 employees is likely to be faced with
an application for unfair dismissal. Therefore, employers who need to manage their businesses successfully and implement changes in their workforce should not be constrained by the operation of what is often seen as excessive legislation in this area.
Apart from the tortuous exercises which must be undertaken by employers and advisers alike when interpreting the Maternity Leave provisions, the Transfer of Undertakings Regulations must cause most practitioners the greatest difficulties. This is a fairly short chapter of the book but it contains a neat summary of the present position.
The book also deals in detail with the individual contract of employment and the rights and obligations of the employer and employee. An employee’s spare time activities are covered under the chapter dealing with duty and fidelity and restraint of trade clauses, but the judgment in the Fischel case was delivered too late to be included.
Commentary on the first whistleblowing case of Fernandes v Netcom is also not available, understandably, and whistleblowers get only a short mention under ‘Unfair Dismissal under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998′, although the author refers readers to his own textbook on the subject, Bowers, Lewis and Mitchell – Whistleblowing: The New Law, a Full Coverage.
Although the Discrimination chapter is quite extensive, disability discrimination is dealt with in only six pages and clearly there will be a need for a more detailed consideration in a specialist text than is available here; indeed coverage is rather cursory given the author’s reputation in this area.
The last four chapters of the book deal with trade unions, collective bargaining and recognition, protection of trade union activity, strikes and picketing. Until recently, for the majority of employers these aspects could have been safely disregarded, but with recognition under the Employment Relations Act 1999 now in place it cannot be ignored. This chapter is right up-to-date and comprehensively deals with the 59 pages of legislation in an easily readable format.
This is a concise textbook and a clear examination of the law in this area, although for busy practitioners a more detailed index would have been helpful.
