Hello, my name is Catherine Barnard. I'm Professor of European Union Law here at the University of Cambridge and Senior Fellow in the UK and a Changing Europe programme.

And I'm going to talk a bit today about workers' rights. Lots of aspects of your working life are actually regulated by EU employment law. Think about equality.

Equality on the grounds of sex, yes, the UK already had those rules, but also on the grounds of sexual orientation, age, religion, belief, all of these come from EU law.

But EU law isn't just about equality, it's also about giving people rights if they are so-called

atypical workers, so they're workers on fixed term contracts, or their part-time workers, or their agency workers.

EU law regulates that too. It regulates

health and safety matters extensively and perhaps most controversially under that heading comes the

working time directive. Again, you'll be familiar with that. That's a directive that gives

four weeks paid annual leave and sets a maximum working week of 48 hours.

And then there's also rules on things like

information and consultation of workers

and protection if your company goes bust,

what happens to the pay that you are left owing,

or if there's gonna be lots of redundancies

in your workplace, again, you've got to be lots of redundancies in your workplace.

Again, you've got to be consulted about that.

All of that comes from EU law.

So what are the good things about EU law?

Well, from a workers' point of view, you've got that protection.

It's also what's known as a floor of rights protection. And what that means is that a UK government can improve upon the floor,

so give you more rights than the directive provides,

but it cannot take you below that floor.

...