Can They Do This?
The question I was asked more than any other, in practice and since, is some version of: Can they do this? Can they change my shifts. Can they read my emails. Can they make me come back to the office. Can they take the Christmas bonus away. Can they sack me for that.
It is the natural question and it is nearly always the wrong one, for two reasons.
The first is that the answer is usually yes. Employers have a great deal of lawful authority. The scope of what an employer may do, if it does it properly and for a reason it can articulate, is much wider than most employees assume, and the gap between "this is outrageous" and "this is unlawful" is where most of the disappointment in this field is generated.
The second reason is more interesting. "Can they do this?" treats the employer as a natural force whose behaviour must be endured or escaped, and treats the law as the only available check on it. But the question that actually determines whether a workplace is a decent place to spend your life is not what the organisation is permitted to do. It is what kind of organisation it is — what it thinks is normal, what it would be embarrassed to be seen doing, what its managers believe they are for.
I have seen organisations with immaculate policies that were miserable to work in, and organisations with no policies at all, run out of an office above a shop, where people were treated with more care than any procedure could require. The difference was not legal and the law cannot produce it.
What the law can do — and this is the modest, real thing — is make the second kind of organisation slightly easier to sustain and the first kind slightly more expensive to be. It sets a floor that the worst cannot go below. It provides a vocabulary in which an objection can be made. It gives the reasonable manager an argument to use against the unreasonable one: not "I think this is wrong", which can be overruled, but "we can't do that", which is harder.
from A Guide to UK Employment Law: Work, Rights and Power in the Modern Workplace (2026)
