Diversity at Work - IDS service

IDS Diversity at Work

IDS Diversity at Work is a monthly journal which aims to provide timely, accurate and high quality information on workplace diversity, equal opportunities and discrimination law. It will help increase your understanding of and compliance with the law, and supply the information and the tools you need to realise the benefits of good practice.

Diversity online

A subscription to IDS Diversity at Work now comes with access to the online service www.idsdiversityatwork.com. Subscribe now and you can access all the latest articles from the monthly journal, plus:

a fully searchable archive of all previous issues

reference guidance which outlines employers' legal obligations and helps you formulate effective diversity policies

full text of discrimination Acts and Statutory Instruments provided by Westlaw UK which are automatically updated as the law changes

statutory Codes of Practice.

In the latest journal:

Helping women and disabled people into work

Many organisations recognise the business benefits of having a diverse workforce. But some of the people they may be looking to attract encounter certain barriers to gaining employment. In this article, we focus on two very different employers that have introduced initiatives which specifically aim to help people who may face obstacles entering or returning to employment – financial services firm Towry Law, which has a return-to-work programme aimed primarily at women who have taken a career break, and InterContinental Hotels Group, which runs a recruitment scheme targeted at people with disabilities.

Justifying age bias in contractual redundancy schemes

MacCulloch v Imperial Chemical Industries plc and Loxley v BAE Systems Land Systems (Munitions and Ordnance) Ltd: In separate cases, the EAT holds that two different employment tribunals had failed to carry out proper assessments of whether direct age discrimination in contractual redundancy schemes was objectively justified. In MacCulloch the tribunal had failed to give ‘a considered recognition of the degree of difference in the payments made to the claimant and the comparator, and an assessment as to whether this is reasonably necessary to achieve the objectives of the scheme’; while in Loxley the tribunal had ‘not grappled with the question whether it was proportionate to exclude the claimant from any redundancy payment altogether because of his entitlement to a pension’.

Plus News and Employment Tribunal reports

IDS Diversity at Work No. 54 December 2008 – full contents list