PART-TIME WORKThe Department of Trade & Industry has issued a consultation document on part-time work which includes proposed regulations -- the Part-time Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000.

The draft regulations are accompanied by brief notes.

The main points are that, to comply with the law:-- part-time employees should receive the same hourly rate as comparable full-time employees, and the same hourly rate of overtime pay as comparable full-time employees, once they have worked more than the normal full-time hours; should not be treated less favourably than full-time employees in terms of the rate of sick pay or maternity pay, the length of service required to qualify for payment; or the length of time the payment is received;-- employers must not discriminate between full-time and part-time employees over access to pension schemes;-- calculation of benefits from the pension scheme for part-time staff should be on a pro-rata basis of the calculation for full-time employees;-- employees should not exclude part-time staff from training;-- the contractual holiday entitlement of part-time staff should be pro-rata to that of full-time employees;-- contractual maternity leave and parental leave should be available to part-time employees as well as full-time employees;-- career break schemes should be available to part-time employees in the same way as full-time staff, unless their exclusion is objectively justified on grounds other than their part-time status;-- objective criteria should be used to select jobs for redundancy.The document states that most employers will not be affected at all by these regulations, since they reflect current practice.

Responses to the consultation document are to be sent by 27 February.INCREASE IN LIMITSFrom 1 February 20 00, the value of many of the awards and payments that may be made to employment tribunals was increased, in accordance with the new system of automatic index-linking.

The new figures reflect changes in the Retail Price Index between September 1997 and September 1999.

Thus, for example, the maximum amount of 'a week's pay' for the purpose of calculating the basic or additional compensation award in unfair dismissal cases, or a statutory redundancy payment, increases by £10 to a new limit of £230.

The limit on the amount of a guarantee payment in respect of any one day is increased by 75p to £16.10.COMPENSATIONBalmoral Group Ltd v Rae, The Times, 25 January 2000An employee who had been signed off work because of stress was dismissed because of his absence.

When compensation fell to be considered, the employers argued that, since the employee had been off sick, it was not appropriate to make any award of loss of earnings because there was no occupational sick pay scheme and thus the employee had suffered no loss.The Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) in Edinburgh, however, upheld the employment tribunal's view that it was impossible to say what would have happened if there had been no dismissal.

The EAT considered that, where an employment tribunal was considering issues of causation in the context of an unfair dismissal compensatory award, a very broad test should be applied, by assessing what was just and equitable having regard to the claimant's loss, so far as that loss was attributable to the employer.

Thus it was inappropriate to introduce principles of foreseeability or remoteness in the technical sense in which those concepts applied in other contexts.