Abstract
This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting.
Highlights
This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance
As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law
The power in s75E Employment Rights Act, once exercised by the Secretary of State in regulation 35 of the Shared Parental Leave Regulations 2014/3050, has resulted in the following qualifying period for those wishing to take shared parental leave: (1) For the purposes of entitlement to shared parental leave ... an employee satisfies the continuity of employment test if the employee – (a) has been continuously employed with an employer for a period of not less than 26 weeks ending with the relevant week (see paragraph (3)); and (b) remains in continuous employment with that employer until the week before any period of shared parental leave taken by the employee
Summary
Qualifying periods limit employees’ entitlements to some of the rights we are talking about: shared parental leave, for example, and the right to request flexible work.. Qualifying periods require employees to work for a particular period of time, here 26 weeks, before they can benefit from the right. I am interested in qualifying periods because many of the women I am interviewing speak of being repeatedly employed on a very short-term basis, making it very difficult for them to reach the required 26 weeks’ work. When Jill talks about qualifying periods, she exhibits a combination of technical precision, resignation and frustration. Along with non-governmental organizations and advice agencies, unions have been arguing against the inclusion of qualifying periods in legislation on family-friendly rights. Employees wishing to claim their statutory allocation of two weeks’ paternity
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