Your rights at work

[georgiamshaw]

Georgia 😊

The problem:

Your rights at work can be very confusing. This could be a hospitality worker not knowing that they are entitled to a 20 min break every six hours of work, which must be taken somewhere in the middle of those 6 hours (so cannot be taken at the beginning or end of the six hours). It could also be a self employed mother to be not knowing what maternity pay she is entitled to from the government. Or a couple adopting a child, wanting to know how much shared parental leave they can take. Lots of people wouldn't know where to find this information online - especially if you're foreign and have just moved to the UK. Once you find the information, it's super hard to read and very jargon-y.

This screenshot is taken from the ACAS website and concerns shared parental pay.

I put that same excerpt from above into a wordcounter, and you'll see on the right hand side that it says the reading level of the text is college graduate.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/sep/28/almost-half-of-all-young-people-in-england-go-on-to-higher-education

This article written in 2017 says that half of all young people are going to university - but that still means that half of young people aren't - and if the wordcounter is to be believed, then that piece of text is above the reading level of half of young people - not to mention the amount of foreign national whose native language isn't English and might struggle to understand it (I know I wouldn't understand that text if it was written in Portuguese, and I consider my Portuguese to be fluent).

The idea:

To create an app that allows the user to find information about their rights at work. This information will be accessible and easy to digest. The user can pick their employment status (self employed, employed, etc) and find out information specific to them. At the moment this project isn't particularly technically exciting/challenging - I see it as being an app that allows the user to choose a few things from a dropdown menu and see copy. SO I am putting it to you, the reader, to engage with this issue and come up with things we can add to make this more interesting for us to work on technically!

Stakeholders:

• Workers - are more aware of their rights, feel more confident in speaking to their employees if something is not right.
• Companies - their employees are clearer about their rights, which could save HR issues.
• Judicial system - less employment tribunal cases!

[Coletterbox]

I love this idea! I've had so many jobs where managers take advantage of the fact that workers don't know their rights.

[gminova]

The gov UK API could come in handy