One question which may come up at or before you plunge into your investigation questions is that of legal representation at the meeting for the witness. If the employee says that he wishes to bring his lawyer, do you have to agree? If not, should you agree anyway? The law on this is very clear … Continue Reading
They do say that maternity in the workplace can be an unsettling and confusing time, leaving you confronting new questions and situations that no one has really prepared you for, and where the guidance comes at you from a range of sources as wide as they are inconsistent. Anyway, enough about employers.… Continue Reading
Through a long and not very relevant series of arguments, the Court of Appeal in De Souza – v – Vinci Construction (UK) Limited has just decided that in effect they are. This is not a surprising conclusion, since otherwise inflation would erode the value of such awards as either proper compensation for the employee … Continue Reading
As we have said many times before on this blog, it is all very well for the Courts and Tribunals to say that overtime must be “taken into account” for holiday pay purposes. What is missing for employers are answers to the key issues of how and when, the practical questions which all the senior … Continue Reading
“What the Court clearly failed to do was to say how, in today’s politically correct world, any Christian can even enter a conversation with a fellow employee on the subject of religion and not potentially later end up in an Employment Tribunal”. These are words of Victoria Wasteney on BBC News Online last week following … Continue Reading
Cast your mind back to a time before July 2013 when the perception was that businesses were regularly on the receiving end of Employment Tribunal claims from disgruntled employees and ex-employees. Times were good for lawyers and bad for employers, one might have said. So sensing a win-win-win (bash lawyers, limit spurious claims against political … Continue Reading
A finding of race discrimination in the UK requires the employee to show both (a) that he was less favourably treated on grounds of race; and (b) that he suffered a detriment. The need to establish (b) separately is often overlooked, in that less favourable treatment is, by itself, pretty invariably a detriment. However, the … Continue Reading
Do you ever think that your line managers are making such a hash of a grievance or disciplinary process that it would be easier to do it yourself? Do you watch in horror as they stumble blindly but unerringly towards what is clearly the wrong decision? Are you tempted to give them a nudge in … Continue Reading
I know that over the years we have said some pretty harsh things in this blog about assorted government proposals and consultation exercises, but I take it all back. There is a new kid in town, the HM Treasury/HMRC consultation document on Simplification of the Tax and National Insurance Treatment of Termination Payments https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/simplification-of-the-tax-and-national-insurance-treatment-of-termination-payments and … Continue Reading
Mbuyi –v- Newpark Childcare is an everyday tale of Christianity meeting homosexuality and sparks ensuing, not in a good way. Put very simply (there was a little more to it, including the glorious non-sequitur “X had replied with a positive comment, given that the Claimant is from Belgium”), a lesbian employee asked an Evangelical Christian … Continue Reading
When a client asks you to take one of your staff off its account, you will tend to jump to it – the client is always right, even when it’s wrong, and you can hopefully find the displaced employee a berth on another account, no harm done. However, where the client is asking you to … Continue Reading
Have you ever looked at the other side’s Schedule of Loss in a Tribunal case and wondered if he inhabits the same legal system you do? Employment Tribunals routinely require such Schedules to try to bring some order and boundaries to both sides’ financial thinking, but this does not always work. Sometimes the compensation at … Continue Reading
In the first part of this piece I looked at the possible application of the US Rooney Rule (the compulsory interviewing of at least one ethnic minority candidate for any senior American Football coaching or management position) and concluded that such a requirement would be unlawful in the UK. I also discounted to some extent … Continue Reading
“Without more, to conduct a case by not telling the truth is to conduct a case unreasonably, it is as simple as that”. A difficult proposition to challenge, you might think. How much more fundamental to the reasonable conduct of judicial proceedings can you get than telling the truth? However, it is not so simple … Continue Reading
