Age must be no barrier to employment

Published on Tuesday 11 July 2006 00:31

TWENTY years ago, you'd be unlikely to find one; now they're everywhere. The rise of the employment lawyer looks set to continue with new age discrimination regulations buoying the workload.

The legislation, due to come in to force in October, is the latest addition to statutes that serve to stop discrimination in the workplace. The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 guarantee that employees will not be discriminated against because of their age. If they are, their employer will be forced to compensate them. Adverts seeking "young and enthusiastic" applicants could be brought into question, as could companies' policies on retirement or long-service awards.

The legislation is the latest in a string of laws designed to stamp out discrimination in the workplace. Employers and employees have already come to terms with rules to prevent staff being persecuted on the grounds of their gender or race.

At last year's Employment Lawyers Association (ELA) annual conference, Michael Rubenstein - the co-editor of the Equal Opportunities Review - described age as "the final frontier in discrimination law". He added: "Employers have learned to their cost how long it takes to change sexist and racist workplace cultures. The message is that time is running out on ageism."

Past legislation covering sexual and racial discrimination has added to the work of employment lawyers and the age-discrimination regulations are expected to increase this load. Changes in other laws affecting employment - such as entitlement to maternity and paternity leave and the introduction of flexible working hours - have seen a rise in the number of specialists in the field.

Figures released to The Scotsman illustrate the growth in the number of employment lawyers working in the UK. In 1994, the association had 469 members. Today the number stands at 2,010.

"There's a recognition on the part of employers and employees that there's a risk involved in getting employment wrong," says Joyce Cullen, the convener of the Law Society of Scotland's employment law committee and the chairwoman of Brodies. "There have been an enormous number of changes in the law and new rights that employees have taken up: from sex, race and disability discrimination through to maternity, pregnancy and flexible-working rules."

Cullen says many of her clients not only want to avoid falling foul of employment legislation but also want to be seen as proactive in this area. "They want to be employers of choice," she explains. "My experience is that the good employers are competing for people and, while the legislative changes have had an impact on them too, they are ahead of the game and are looking to put policies in place to be good employers."

With the rise in the number of laws governing employment, Cullen believes there has been a clear rise in the number of specialist employment lawyers to deal with the corresponding casework: "From Brodies' perspective, when I started doing employment law, 15 or 16 years ago, there were only two of us and now there are 23."

Alun Thomas, the head of Anderson Strathern's employment unit, has noticed the same rise. "When I started working in this area, back in the 1980s, it was pretty rare to be able to say you were a specialist just doing employment law," he says. "Since then the market has developed and the need for specialists has developed to such an extent that we have people on my team who have not done anything but employment law".

Thomas is proud that his unit not only represents employers but also takes on the cases of employees, something he thinks is often missed out by the larger law firms.

Anderson Strathern's employment unit has grown steadily over the last decade, hiring on average one new member of staff each year. Its numbers have been swollen over the last six months, with Allan Masson and Murray McCall joining as partners.

Thomas says: "While clients may be perfectly happy to take advice from their normal solicitor in relation to all sorts of business matters, sometimes they need specialist advice. That's also reflected in our decision to set-up our discrimination unit - to deal with an area that's not even a subset of employment law, it's much broader.

"It's an area that is growing all the time. Clients in the 1980s were asking, 'what should we do about employment?'; as we move into the 21st century, people are asking 'what should we do about discrimination?'.

As well as founding its discrimination unit, Thomas's team has also introduced Club HR, which involves a group of people meeting four or five times each year to discuss employment law matters.

"Most employment law providers will run seminars for their clients but we decided to do something different," Thomas explains. "We don't just target the senior HR people but say, 'Let's get a group of people together in an environment where we're all learning together.' The notion of the club is that we're all in this because we want to share views and experiences in a way that avoids the scenario of airing your dirty washing, which sometimes happens at these things: people are reluctant to say, 'We did this and it didn't work.'"

Harper Macleod is also innovating in employment law. The firm pioneered the use in Scotland of the mock employment tribunal, which has now become a mainstay of its events programme and also one of the most popular training methods it has on offer.

"We have now changed it to make it more interactive," explains Claire McManus, the head of Harper Macleod's employment team. "The latest mock we ran was a disciplinary scenario, with stopped every so often, so questions could be posed for the delegates. That made it even more of a learning experience for them, illustrating pitfalls brought up by the scenario."