ABSTRACT
Employment protection rights are often mentioned in employment law courses, but very few go through them in a large amount of detail. In the context of this book, employment protection rights are taken to mean those rights that are derived from statute: originally the Employment Protection Act 1975, now the Employment Rights Act (ERA) 1996 and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act (TULR(C)A) 1992, both as amended by the Employment Relations Act 1999, and the Employment Acts 2002 and 2004, which create a set of basic minimum rights that the employer cannot contract out of. Some courses deal with these rights at appropriate points in the course: for example, the right to an itemised pay statement is dealt with when looking at the implied duty to pay the employee. However, it is useful for the purposes of this text to separate the rights out and look at them in isolation, as long as students are aware that such rights may permeate throughout other examination questions. In this particular chapter, we will look at rights owed by the employer to the employee, excluding dismissal rights, which are dealt with in Chapter 9. Once these rights are extracted, general rights that the student needs to understand are:
notice rights;
rights in relation to payment;
maternity, adoption and parental rights;
rights not to suffer a detriment in certain cases;
time-off provisions.
