Employment Rights

Employment Rights and Psychological Safety

Thanks so much to newsletter reader Andrea Notch for pointing me at Mona Chalabi’s illustrations of statistical ideas and topics – while I was having a look at Mona’s work, this one on unionisation stood out:

Mona does a great job of illustrating a trend over time of increasing wages, and the fact that wages for people who are members of a union tend to be higher. The second in this series also shows the disparity between the wages of men and women. This illustration reminded me of a conversation that I’ve had a few times, most recently last week in Tennessee, about employment rights, protection from unfair dismissal, and prevention of discrimination at work.

In Europe, particularly in countries such as Germany, workers typically enjoy very strong employment rights. For example, large German organisations tend to have Works Councils (Betriebsräte), that are sort of internal “unions” set up by employees. Works councils help to ensure that all laws, rules and health provisions are applied correctly and to the benefit of the employees. Even without a union or a works council, in most of Europe, it is illegal to arbitrarily fire someone from a job without going through a fair documented process. Employees are also protected by law against discrimination in the workplace, and have rights to minimum paid sick leave

In contrast, most states in the US are considered “at-will” employment states. This means the employee or the employer may terminate their work relationship at any time without the need to provide prior notice or without the need for a just cause. Exceptions apply where an employee is dismissed due to a protected characteristic such as pregnancy, LGBTQ status (though these rights are being eroded), or age, but these cases can be hard and expensive to prove for the ex-employee. 

In other countries around the world, workers’ rights vary widely. Anecdotally, from my work in and with different organisations globally, strong, well-defined rights for workers appear to correlate with greater psychological safety. Whilst culture and behaviour still play the largest roles here, perhaps greater rights at least act as a signal to workers that they should be treated fairly. And maybe telling your boss bad news is easier if you don’t fear reprisal in the form of being sacked or demoted.

Exploring this idea further is where I’d like your help. We have over 7000 readers from all over the world, which presents a great opportunity to research this important topic. You can contribute by filling in this short survey about employment law and policy where you work, and the degree to which you feel safe giving your boss “bad news”.

The anonymous data will be shared with all respondents, and the aggregated insights will be presented in a future newsletter. Depending on the results of this preliminary survey, we may be inspired to carry out a full research study! Complete it here, it should only take about a minute.

New Date! Online Practice Masterclass 21st August

Unfortunately one of our clients had to postpone a series of workshops scheduled for August, but the upshot is that we now have some extra time! So we’ve decided to schedule a bonus online Practice Masterclass Workshop for the 21st August at 2pm UK time.  This session sold out last time so register and find out more here.

New stickers!

I think designing stickers is one of my guilty pleasures. We have two new fun designs available to buy now. Alternatively, you can get your hands on some by attending a workshop, or promoting the psychsafety.com newsletter and/or workshops on social media (such as LinkedIn). If you let us know you’ve done this by emailing stickers@psychsafety.com (and include your postal address) we’ll send you some for free!

This week’s poem:

Still Here, by Langston Hughes

I been scarred and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me,
Sun has baked me,
Looks like between ’em they done
Tried to make me
Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’–
But I don’t care!
I’m still here!