 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 in a Changing Europe programme. 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 if they're workers on fixed-term contracts or they're part-time workers or they're 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 the 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 going 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 worker's 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. And so it gives a good standard of protection. One of the arguments against largely from the employer's side is that, of course, all of this comes with costs attached. And a lot of employers say that EU rules are immensely bureaucratic. They add burdens to their business. And also that EU law sits uncomfortably with UK traditions of regulating relations between workers and employers. What happens if we voted to leave on the 23rd of June? What will happen to those rules? Well, nothing will change overnight. Much depends on what might be put in place going forward. If we do a Norway, as it's called, which is joining the European Economic Area, then EU employment rules will carry on applying. The Norwegians have to respect EU employment law, and so will we. But without any say about the future shape of what those employment law rules will look like. If, however, we do not join the European Economic Area, then what you'll get will be some other trade agreement, and the trade agreement will not extend to the protection of workers' rights. So what that will mean is that there will be a repeal of the European Communities Act. That's the act which took us into the EU and which requires us to respect EU law and workers' rights in particular. And the UK government will then have flexibility to either repeal the rights that we've got, or it's thought more likely perhaps amend those rights that the UK government doesn't like the look of. So going forward, what's the consequence? What we know is that workers do benefit from these rights, but it is important to remember that what you have at EU level is a patchwork of rights. It's not a comprehensive protection that you find at domestic law. It's not a replication of the rights that you get under UK law. If all of those rights were repealed, clearly it would be a good thing for some employers, a bad thing for workers, but there are still key areas of protection, for example unfair dismissal, redundancy. All of these are left to the Member States, never been covered by EU law. One final point worth bearing in mind, employers say regulatory burden is one of the biggest concerns they have. If you look at the UK's position in context, you look at what the OECD says, that the UK is still second or third least regulated modern economies, and that's worth bearing in mind when you're hearing the discussion about the burdens on business.