Employment Practice

Key points The Redundancy Payments Act 1965 (whose provisions have long since been repealed and largely re-enacted in the Employment Rights Act 1996) came into force on 6 December 1965. The two principal objectives of the Act were to require employers to compensate redundant employees for the loss of their livelihoods and to establish a Redundancy Fund from which employers would recoup a percentage (or rebate) of any statutory redundancy payment due and paid to a redundant employee. However, the already (by then) much-mutilated redundancy rebates scheme was abolished when the Employment Act 1989 came into force on 16 January 1990. It should be noted that the purpose of the redundancy payments scheme is to compensate a redundant employee for the loss of his (or her) investment in his job – not, as might be supposed, to provide him with sufficient funds to help him survive a period of unemployment. Accordingly, any employee who has lost his job because of redundancy may legit

Key points Under the provisions of the Race Relations Act 1976, it is unlawful for any person in Great Britain to discriminate against another person on grounds of colour, race, nationality or national or ethnic origins – whether in the field of employment or in the provision of goods, facilities or services. The 1976 Act, which repealed and replaced earlier Race Relations Acts, identifies three forms of racial discrimination, each of which is unlawful. These are: direct discrimination  (which occurs when a person is treated less favourably than other persons because of his or her colour, race, nationality, etc); indirect discrimination  (which occurs when a person is effectively denied access to employment opportunities, goods, facilities, services, etc by the imposition of an unjustifiable condition or requirement which places him or her at a disadvantage relative to persons of a different racial group); and discrimination in the form of  victimisation or racial