Yahoo Finance 
How workers' rights could change after Brexit
The EU withdrawal bill, if it goes through, will transfer legislation into the post-Brexit world. If it really is Independence Day then will the UK government start looking at legislation and repealing those parts it doesn’t like?
Let’s look at discrimination law – this is an amalgamation of UK made and European law, with the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act being followed in 1976 by the original Race Relations Act, which was a culmination of poor race relations that emerged and increasing disquiet over the treatment of women at work.
Since then there has been 40 years of both new legislation and case law, which means that many principles have been established in UK courts. This thick matrix of law made by the UK is a Gordian knot, and most politicians, local authorities, government supported institutions and employers will, in all likelihood, not want to change this because of a fundamental question: what would take its place?
The UK has been through the pains and trauma of visceral and direct racism and sexism, and there is now a culture which rejects discrimination – it could be argued that one the reasons for the Brexit vote is that many people felt that it was unfair and unequal that austerity was directed at those people with the least resources, so chose to vote Brexit in protest. Indeed many areas with large numbers of South Asians voted Leave.
There is a deep-seated sense of fairness in the UK public, though sometimes the connection between fairness and equality is not always clearly made. In other words, which father is going to say that his daughter can’t go to university, but his son can? Or that it is okay for his daughter to earn less than a son, when they do the same or equivalent jobs?
Unfortunately, there is also history of increase in self-reported racial discrimination in times of economic downturns, as David Johnston and Grace Lordan’s research reveals.
Plus, there appears to be a heightened sense of ‘us’ and the ‘other’, which often takes a colour of skin approach, as evidenced by the rise in islamophobia with the use of words such as ‘deviant’ or ‘unbritish’ discovered by Amir Saeed’s study.
We saw a rise in race hate crimes around the time of campaigning and since the Brexit vote.
Such spikes may become ‘table mountains’ if Brexit does not go well, and we may have extended periods of racism. The same could be said for sexism as intimate partner abuse also increases in relation to rising unemployment. Plus women have suffered more from the global financial crisis.
Younger women’s employment has not recovered and half of the growth is in the form of self-employment, with the gender pay gap still at 9.1%.
So what does this mean for equality legislation? More than ever protection by the law is needed in order to symbolise the tolerance the British are famous for and, which I for one, feel is still there.
But it needs the support of laws that are taken seriously, such as the Supreme Court’s judgment which has swept away fees that were labelled illegal and an impediment to access to the law – principles of fairness that go back, at least, to the Magna Carta.
The EU withdrawal bill may end up excluding the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which are designed to provide a line, below which people should not fall, and effectively it is a moral line which is both a literal and symbolic statement of how people – you the reader – should be treated.
Fairness and rights are at the core of British culture and should be at the centre of Parliament’s deliberations on discrimination law. So why exclude the Charter, if there is nothing to replace it?
We have no indication of what the government sees as an alternative. Dominic Grieve MP, who served as Attorney General for England and Wales and Advocate General for Northern Ireland from May 2010 to July 2014, has tabled an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill to include the Charter, not least of all, as it provides the principles which help in determining the scope of protection and has helped developed legislation in areas of discrimination law, privacy (including online and social media) and children’s rights.
Read more:
Brexit: EU cancels Britain’s hosting of European capital of culture
Gibraltar faces the ‘existential threat’ of a hard Brexit with no transition deal
Brexit could cause fatal delays for cancer patients who need urgent treatment, experts warn
Regardless of what kind of Brexit emerges, the UK government could produce a vision which elevates rights to the best in the world, a country that truly understands the value of human beings. And that would be the point in time to replace the Charter – with a vision that increases human rights and protection of individual liberty.
After all the opposite side of the coin to democracy is meritocracy. And meritocracy needs the law so that everyone is treated fairly in employment and services and to make sure it really is the best people for the job who are employed – not based on prejudice or other unfairness – rather for who they are …for who you are.
Harminder Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Warwick Business School and a consultant, who has worked with the United Nations and sits on the Employment Appeal Tribunal.
