Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period

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.

Bargaining for work–family benefits in the UK

“…This excludes all workers on zero hours contracts, and in other forms of discontinuous and variable employment such as freelancers. Qualifying periods have been described as ways of ‘easing’ the introduction of new rights in the field of work–family policy, allowing legislators to limit the scope of application (Grabham, 2016: 401). Whilst this discretion for policymakers allows them to expand provision later, in practice exclusionary qualifying periods have become a norm, creating a strongly inegalitarian effect on individuals and households.…”

New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism

“…Migration researchers have explored the different ways in which immigration controls shape migrants' relation to the labour market, and how temporary visas often push them into highly precarious work. Yet workers who have not been employed for longer than a certain period cannot make certain kinds of claims on an employer and qualifying periods structure the standard employment relationship for migrants and citizens alike (Grabham, 2016). Despite their apparently marginal status, qualifying periods are a key part of the legal apparatus enabling and encouraging 'the structural expansion of contingent employment' (Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 742).…”

Law and Speed: Asylum Appeals and the Techniques and Consequences of Legal Quickening

“…33 From the regulation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and investigations into historical instances of child abuse, to 'time-related legal technicalities [such as] qualifying periods' that deny access to rights on the basis of nothing more than temporality and delay, law produces time that is politically laden and inflected. 34 Given the role of law in the acceleration of social life on the state's terms, such scholarship argues for a heightened awareness of the law's role in 'social and political processes of temporal ordering'. 35 While this article both endorses and aims to contribute towards interest in the temporalities of law, this is not to underestimate the difficulties inherent to such an endeavour.…”