Monthly Archives: October 2019

ByIngerVerh Firm:Claeys & Engels

How doesBelgian law safeguard mental health in the workplace? This article describes the law and provides some guidance for employers.

The issue of mental health in the workplace

According to the Special Eurobarometer produced by the European Commission, almost one in ten Europeans struggles with mental health issues. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that the costs related to mental health problems for the European economy can go up to USD 140 billion per year.

According to the Belgian HR provider Securexs yearly analysis, the number of employees being absent in Belgium has significantly and systematically increased every year starting from 2001. During 2018, out of 100 employees, seven were sick on an average workday. It is mainly long-term sickness (i.e. illness or incapacity lasting more than one year) that has lead to this worrying evolution. This increasing problem of long-term sickness is caused by the aging of the Belgian workforce due to the abolition of early pension schemes and burnout and mental health problems.

Despite these figures, it has taken a long time for mental health at work to get the attention it deserves. Not so however in Belgian law.

The Act on the Wellbeing of Employees in the Workplace

As early as 2002, the Belgian legislator acknowledged that the wellbeing of employees is not just derived from physical health and safety measures and introduced the concept of psychosocial wellbeing in the so-called Act on the Wellbeing of Employees in the Workplace. A chapter was included in this act that focussed on three forms of so-called psychosocial risks: violence, harassment and sexual harassment at work.

Since then employers have been obliged to implement measures to prevent violence, harassment and sexual harassment occurring in the workplace. Every employer must appoint a special prevention counsellor, specialised in psychosocial issues in the workplace and implement a global (five-year) and yearly action plan including internal reporting procedures. As the special prevention counsellor is usually an external expert, many companies will also appoint an internal person of trust.

Victims of violence, harassment or sexual harassment can also bring a complaint before the employment court to obtain an injunction to stop the unacceptable behaviour or claim damages from the harasser and/or the employer who did not take sufficiently effective measures.

Wider-ranging obligations for employers

In 2014, the scope of the Act on Wellbeing was extended and employers now have to ban any type of psychosocial burden at work.

This means prevention plans should also focus on measures to improve mental health at work and the internal reporting procedures and legal remedies are also accessible for employees suffering from health problems following stress or burnout.

Mental health issues and the courts

In view of the increasing number of employees with mental health problems, it was anticipated that this legislative change would lead to an increase in court cases. But this is not the case: after five years the number of cases on psychosocial risks at work is still rather limited and mainly deal with harassment at work.

However, we have seen an increase in cases on discrimination. Belgian law not only protects against discrimination based on disability but also on the employees health circumstances. Under general employment law, an employee can be validly dismissed during a period of sickness or health problems. Employees will, however, increasingly go to court to claim damages based on discrimination or for a manifestly unreasonable dismissal when they are dismissed during a period of sickness or during a period of reinstatement after sickness. Although Belgian courts are still quite reluctant to grant damages on these grounds, employers should be careful. In general, Belgian courts will accept that employers can have valid reasons to dismiss an employee who suffers from mental health problems, such as the need to deal with organisational problems resulting from the absence or the need to replace an employee who is not motivated and not performing well. However, they should be able to provide clear evidence of the justification.

There is no case law yet on the question of whether a long-term mental problem such as burnout could qualify as a disability, leading to an even stronger protection for employees. However we expect this to follow soon.

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Belgium + Comments from other countries - Mental health at work: how healthy is the law? - Lexology

President Trumps best-laid plans sometimes turn out to be little more than slogans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi memorably called his bluff in a meeting between Trump and congressional leaders on the Syria situation.

The House had just voted, 354-60, on a rare and overwhelming bipartisan rebuke of the presidents announced withdrawal of U.S. troops. That action opened a door for Turkey to attack Syrian Kurds who have been fighting the Islamic State with American support.

Like earlier meetings between Trump and congressional leaders, this one turned contentious, according to media reports. At one point, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer intervened in an argument between Trump and Pelosi, a California Democrat, to ask the president, Is your plan to rely on the Syrians and the Turks?

To which Trump replied, Our plan is to keep the American people safe.

Thats not a plan, Pelosi said. Thats a goal.

Bingo. Thank you, Madam Speaker. My biggest complaint about Trump since he first entered the 2016 race was his wealth of wishes with no visible path to achieve them.

That trickery, or fakery, began with his slogan, Make America Great Again. Thats an easy goal to achieve if you never reveal what you mean by great. Its hard to hold people accountable if they avoid being specific about their plans. Now Trump has updated his slogan to Keep America Great for his reelection campaign, while Im still wondering what he meant the first time.

But thats just me. Before Trump defenders warm up their word processors to tell me how great they feel these days, despite the fast-moving impeachment inquiry haunting the presidents plans, I hasten to add that being long on goals but short on plans is not limited to any one party.

A striking example showed itself at the Democratic presidential debate in Ohio the night before the White House meeting. Former Vice President Joe Biden was holding on to his lead. But breathing down his neck was Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has made a campaign slogan of Ive got a plan for that.

As her rivals put that slogan to the test, a dilemma soon became apparent. Warren has been catching up to Biden by adopting more aggressively progressive positions. But moving too far left to impress Democratic primary voters could cost her support from the moderate swing voters who ultimately have decided close elections.

Perhaps it was with that in mind that Warren seemed to be inching toward the middle. For example, instead of promising to confiscate assault-style rifles like former Rep. Beto ORourke of Texas does, she supported more achievable gun laws.

But on the big issue of Medicare for All, she stuck with her earlier endorsement of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders call for the abolition of all private insurance for basic health care.

She also ruled out the possibility of pivoting to a voluntary plan that would allow us consumers to choose for ourselves whether we want to move to government insurance or keep our private insurance.

All of which makes me wonder whether Democrats, particularly on the progressive wing, learned nothing from the fights President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats struggled through in order to get the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, passed or to get its website to work.

In April, Sanders reintroduced his proposed Medicare for All Act for a single-payer system to replace all current public and private coverage, which, according to an Urban Institute study of his original 2016 campaign proposal, would ultimately raise federal expenditures by about $3 trillion a year. Most Americans would save money in the long run, but it would raise income taxes on most in the short run.

No wonder politicians are so reluctant to even bring up the details of how such grand plans are to be financed. Trump, by contrast, promised as a candidate to repeal and replace Obamacare with something that will be cheaper and give better coverage. Were still waiting for that to happen.

Watching how effectively Pelosi has flummoxed the homework-averse Trump with her interest in such details makes me wish she was on that candidate debate stage. Thats not likely to happen, but those who are can learn a lot from her insistence not just on a lofty goals but also on practical ways to achieve them.

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They Could Learn Something From Pelosi - Lynchburg News and Advance

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully grabbed another headline last week by tweeting that Americans should have a real conversation about abolishing prisons. Though she did later walk back this bone-toss to her far-left supporters, the prison abolition movement isnt as niche as youd think.

At their annual meeting this year, theDemocratic Socialists of America passed a resolutionto start a working group on the topic. In April,the ACLU told the New York Timesit wants to defund the prison system.

The idea behind this radical proposal is this: If we could just get our systems right our healthcare system, our education system, our welfare system we wouldntneedany prisons. If everyone just had proper healthcare, great teachers, and all the money they could want or need, no one would commit any crimes.

Its a bit like suggesting we should abolish doctors; because if all had equal access to leafy greens and the flu shot, no one would ever get sick.

Obviously, part of the prison abolition movements strategy is to shock and turn heads toward these other issues. But such a proposal is also a particularly obtuse expression of Utopianism.

Chuck Colson defined Utopianism as the myth that human nature can be perfected by government. Utopianism has at least two core flaws: First, it completely misunderstands the human condition. Because human beings are corrupted by sin, we gravitate toward greed, selfishness, and pride without the redirection of the Holy Spirit. In fact, we do this without help of any kind our sin is not societys fault or caused by poverty. You cant educate us out of our sinful natures.

In fact, even the most devoted prison abolitionists cant make it through a single morning without falling short of their own standards, much less Gods standards. And neither can we.

Todays prison abolitionists fail to acknowledge the scores of men and women who had every conceivable privilege and went on to commit crimes anyway. Wealthy Wall Streeters commit white-collar crimes. Americas Ivy League campuses arguably the veryseatsof privilege are plagued by sexual assault. Even some perpetrators of mass shootings came from stable, affluent families.

A second problem with Utopianism is that any attempt to create this fantasy world where no one commits a crime means advocating for government control on an unprecedented scale. Any government with that much power would quickly end any illusion of utopia. After all, governments are still made up of fallen human beings.

Every utopian project that has been tried so far has failed. Many were led by characters like Stalin and Mao and Castro international revolutionaries who turned almost cartoonishly fast from men of the people into tyrants. History teaches it best: Presuming to create a perfect system will ultimately degrade into power grabs and human misery.

Because of the accurate way the Bible describes the human condition, we can expect prisons to continue as a necessary part of society until Christ makes all things new. In Matthew 25, Jesus instructs his followers tovisitthose in prison. An effective prison system will keep people safe, communicate the consequences of wrong-doing to the larger culture, and work to return the imprisoned to our community with better means and accountability by which to govern their own fallen impulses.

And let me add this: Because we believe the incarcerated are human beings made in the image of God and that restoration is possible, the Colson Center stands with Prison Fellowship and others who support criminal justice reforms that address the very real problems of over-incarceration and sentencing disparity.

But, the idea of abolishing prison is an unrealistic, and yet very real, distraction from the necessary conversations we need to be having about how to handle crime in our communities. Not to mention, its a poster child of Utopianism.

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BreakPointis a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.

John Stonestreetis President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host ofBreakPoint,a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN),and is the co-author ofMaking Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

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Should We Abolish All Prisons? - Human Fallenness, the Role of Government, and the Myth of Utopia - Christianheadlines.com

There are plenty of familiar metaphors for politics a swamp, a circus, a schoolyard but John Kass, an opinion columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has come up with a new one. In a recent column, Kass describes the Democratic party as an organization of singing derelicts in an edible fantasy land. He writes that hearing Democratic presidential candidates discuss their platforms is like staring from a distance at the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a well-known and well-loved folk song, written at the turn of the 20th century by songwriter and poet Harry Haywire McClintock and sung from the point of view of a wandering hobo. The hobo imagines a world less harsh than our own, where instead of sleeping on the street and riding the rail he rests in an idyllic utopia. Kass quotes part of the first verse, which goes:

Kass calls this an encapsulation of Democratic economic policy, a program he sees as being written for modern Americans whove been trained to despise the freedom offered by capitalism, while yearning for free stuff promised by the federal masters. But our intrepid pundit is not so easily lured in. I concentrated on what the candidates were saying, Kass writes, and it completely harshed my mellow. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is just a fantasy.

In the technical sense, this is true. But even a fantasy comes from somewhere. In the case of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, it came McClintock, a man who did indeed live as a hobo and also wrote the song Hallelujah, Im a Bum! But there was more to McClintocks story. He was a union organizer who worked on oil fields in West Texas, and a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union founded at the turn of the century. It was not a politically neutral organization, and its revolutionary orientation was summarized in its constitution, which called for abolition of the wage system. Setting out to become One Big Union, the IWW included miners, textile workers, and farmworkers alike. Its founders included Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. Members were colloquially referred to as Wobblies, a fitting sign of irreverence and humor that characterized the organizations rhetoric.

One of the IWWs greatest legacies is its songs, of which The Big Rock Candy Mountain is an unofficial example. The core canon, meant to be sung on shop floors during strikes and streets during marches, is collected in a pamphlet called The Little Red Songbook, first published in 1909. Its influence is wide and varied a young Leonard Cohen, at Jewish community camp, learned to write songs from studying its contents, and its best-known song, Solidarity Forever, remains the anthem of the American labor movement. Those unfamiliar with this body of work should immediately seek out Utah Phillipss recording of IWW songs, We Have Fed You All for A Thousand Years.

For the songs to function effectively for a multiethnic, multilingual labor movement, they had to be easy to understand and sing. So they were plagiarized from more familiar melodies; as Phillips puts it, the wobblies liked to steal the hymn tunes because they were pretty, and change the words so they made more sense. But they were more than propaganda; many of them, like Bread and Roses or McClintocks work, deal with less straightforward questions of what makes a good life.

Many of the most famous songs in the collection were written by Joe Hill, a Swedish immigrant and itinerant worker who was executed in 1915 for the murder of a policeman. He was almost certainly falsely accused, and the trial was so corrupt that even President Woodrow Wilson opposed his verdict. One of Hills songs, The Preacher and the Slave, is the origin of the expression, pie in the sky. The song was first performed by McClintock and some co-conspirators, under circumstances Utah Phillips describes on record:

Pie in the sky has become an expression often used to malign political programs that seek to provide for the working class and the poor; the kind of politics John Kass dismisses as a fantasy. But the song itself describes quite the opposite. Joe Hill mocked the promise of religion, that a life of poverty would lead to redemption and comfort in heaven after death. Work and pray, live on hay; you'll get pie in the sky when you die, says the preacher, all the while collecting money from working people. But the song ends with the workers of the world uniting. Rebuilding society, they enlist the grifting preachers to serve the workers instead, cooking and chopping wood. As IWW founding member Big Bill Haywood put it, nothings too good for the working class. Perhaps John Kass should grab a pot and pan.

Shuja Haider is a writer-at-large at The Outline.

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The pundit and the hobo - The Outline

The housing market poses big policy challenges for every government and chief among them is the private rental sector. Ensuring adequate supply at affordable rates, in a way which works for both the landlord and the tenant is no small feat; there are competing interests to weigh and innumerable adverse consequences to consider. Tenants understandably demand greater security and affordability, while landlords despair over anti-social renters and rent arrears, and the risk to their portfolio. Governments of all stripes have grappled with the difficulties and proposed their own fixes.

To discuss the way forward Prospect and the National Landlords Association (NLA) convened a panel at Conservative Party conference in Manchester on 30th September. In attendance were Chris Norris, Director of Policy and Practice at the NLA; John Fuller, leader of south Norfolk council and deputy leader of the Conservative Party in local government; Greg Beales, Campaign Director at Shelter; and Dawn Foster, a freelance journalist with a specialism in housing. The panel was chaired by Prospects Deputy Editor Steve Bloomfield.

The background to the discussion was a significant change in regulation published earlier in the year: the abolition of no-fault evictions as laid out in Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. This currently allows landlords to seek eviction of renters on assured shorthold tenancies with two months notice, after the expiry of an initial fixed term (typically six to 12 months). This is at the landlords discretion and legal whether the tenant has done anything wrong or not, in contrast with Section 8 notices which require proof of a ground for possession, such as rent arrears and anti-social behaviour.

Explaining what recent changes mean for the sector, Norris kicked off the conversation, arguing that new uncertainties are causing real problems for Britains 2m landlords. Owing not just to uncertainty around Section 21 but other changes to things like mortgage relief and capital gains tax, they cant plan their futures, they cant plan their investments, they often cant plan their retirements. In his view this isnt just bad for the landlord but for everybody: landlords cant offer the range of households the homes that theyve been asked to offer, meaning that youve got an industry that has money to invest, that wants to provide something and doesnt feel able. Landlords need to have an exit mechanism if things go wrong or [their] plans change. Section 21 provides this.

Headlines might focus on security for the tenant but you could argue security for the landlord is crucial. Fuller was just as keen to stress the rights landlords require to provide the homes we all need. The government must give them an opportunity to make a reasonable return on a responsible basis, and also recognise that sometimes their circumstances do change. Managing local housing markets as we do in south Norfolk, weve got to be respectful of that fact, with certain policiesarguably the abolition of section 21creating challenges in this regard. It is not fair if just because someone becomes a landlord in the first place, theyre handcuffed to the system in perpetuity.

The overarching consequence of making the situation less appealing for landlords, is that you could end up with a reduction in supply, and that doesnt help anybody.

Of course vulnerable tenants can find themselves on the sharp end of the market and Fuller stressed that his local authority provides the backstop of support in that event. Its not just the tenants, its not just the landlords, our job is to help run the middle.

There is no question that tenants can face immense uncertainty too. For Beales, the governments commitment to abolishing Section 21 is welcome. Section 21 gives landlords the power to evict children who then have to move school, they might have to change their doctors, might change all the public services that go with that and be uprooted. In its research Shelter has come across examples of elderly people being evicted on the basis that the landlord doesnt want to pay for the adaptations that are necessary for that person staying in the home. For Beales, the landlord certainly needs the right to turf out problematic tenants, but they should pursue it through section 8 if it is anti-social behaviour or similar. Young people and the elderly should not be at the whim of a system that gives them no protection and no right of recourse.

Foster, meanwhile, explained that she herself was in the private rental sector like most in the millennial generation and had often suffered from unjust practices. Over six years she lived in ten properties because we kept being evicted. There is a huge amount of uncertainty for tenants. There have been some improvements, particularly with the recent abolition of letting agents fees, but the fact remains that if you are a private renter, you are completely at the mercy of your landlord. Section 8 means that its quite straightforward to evict problem tenants, people who arent paying their rent or keeping the property in good condition. That means section 21 is not necessary and arguably that abolition is defensible.

However this position was questioned, with landlords challenging the characterisation of section 8 as straightforward. Norris said, I dont have a problem losing section 21 in theory if we can get the rest of the system to work. Beales agreed that it was worth twinning court reform with the abolition of section 21.

The wide-ranging discussion went on to cover the idea of rent controls, regulation in comparable democracies like Germany, and other recent reforms to the housing sector. The theme though remained the balance of responsibility between the tenant and the landlord. There can be a lot of antagonism between the two sides. But all have an interest in getting this right. And as Beales said, usually when markets work well there is not so much antagonism between the user and provider of the service.

Lessor and Lessee were suggested by the audience as new terms: a way to break the mindset that has set in around the words tenant and landlord. Most panellists, despite urging their own policy reforms, agreed that might be a good start.

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The evolving role of the landlord - Prospect