IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/indlaw/v53y2024i3p505-523..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Act 2023: Implications for Protection Against Sexual Harassment

Author

Listed:
  • Nicole Busby

Abstract

From October 2024 when the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 comes into force, employers will be required to comply with a new duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees. Under the Act, an employment tribunal will have the power to increase compensation by up to 25% if it finds that an employer has breached this duty. The Act started out as a private members bill and, in its original form, the bill contained a provision to extend protection against workplace harassment perpetuated by a third party such as a customer, client or visitor. However, following a difficult passage through Parliament, this provision was removed, and other proposed protections watered down. The reasons for this are explored in the following analysis which reveals the prioritisation of freedom of speech concerns over an improved legal regime for protecting workers against sexual harassment. The paper concludes by considering the Act’s likely impact and what further protections are needed in this area.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicole Busby, 2024. "The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act) Act 2023: Implications for Protection Against Sexual Harassment," Industrial Law Journal, Industrial Law Society, vol. 53(3), pages 505-523.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:indlaw:v:53:y:2024:i:3:p:505-523.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/indlaw/dwae031
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:indlaw:v:53:y:2024:i:3:p:505-523.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/ilj .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.