Beyond Borders: Enforcing Employment Rights – A Comparative Case Study

Labour's Employment Rights Bill has been described by deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, as the biggest change to worker rights in over a generation. 

Rightly, much attention has been paid to enhancements in employment rights such as extending unfair dismissal to the first day of employment. Much less attention, however, is paid to how effective legal systems are in enabling the enforcement of these rights. It is one thing having legal protections, but these can be illusory for workers if enforcement is too costly or difficult.

In this insight, we collaborated with our Ius Laboris colleagues around the world to compare the British experience with the experience of litigants in 20 other jurisdictions. To do this we used two hypothetical but commonplace scenarios to map claims in the different countries - the first a straightforward performance dismissal and the second a more complex sexual harassment claim.