In Siddika v Guardian Care Home the Birmingham Tribunal awarded £7000 against the company whose boss allegedly sent her text messages that were overly familiar; asked for sex; made dirty phone calls. The sum of £7000 includes loss of earnings and injury to feelings and seems low. The Tribunal may have been awarding less because they didn't believe everything the claimant told them.
Boss too drunk to be punished
The current law is that if an employer fails to follow basic dismissal procedure any award for compensation is increased by at least 10% and can be increased by 50%. A tribunal can in exceptional cases refuse to increase the award. The Glasgow Employment Tribunal has given such an example in Foley v Galbraith. The employee was a Personal Assistant sacked without any warning or meetings. His boss employed him personally to do his washing, ironing, shopping and to pay his bills. . However his boss couldn't recall anything about the allegations of theft that he said caused dismissal as he was an alcoholic with severe physical disability. For this reason the Tribunal felt it unfair to punish the employer further. The P.A. got loss of earnings for 13 months in a total award of just under £14,000.
How not to deal with depression
In Adamczyk v East Sussex County Council the claimant was off ill for depression from Summer 03 to Spring 04. When she tried to come back in a phased return to work she was told that her post was no longer necessary. It does sometimes happen that employers only realise that they are overstaffed when someone is off sick or on maternity leave. In this case the Tribunal decided that the real reason was that they didn't want the aggro of dealing with a depressive employee. The give away was the fact that the School were advertising to recruit for almost the same post as the Claimant. This is a big warning against using the dodge of a "redundancy" to get round the Disability Discrimination Act.
£60,000 for unfairly dismissed 57 year old
The Industrial Tribunal in Belfast has awarded the maximum compensation for a 57 year old IT manager sacked to make way for another colleague. McDonald v Auto Indemnity (UK) Ltd is a useful reminder that Tribunals take it as read that older employees find it harder to find alternative work and that loss of earnings awards can be made for several years pay.
Sacked for eating 6 grapes
The Daily Mirror reports the astonishing dismissal by Waitrose of a man with learning disability for eating six grapes left loose by a customer in a trolley. This isn't a Tribunal case yet but seems to me to be a clear cut case of management following procedure without engaging their brains.
Holiday invite costs boss £33,000
The Exeter Tribunal has awarded £33,697 in Bing v Chard Town Council and Prior against the Council's ex Lord Mayor for sexual harassment. The Council had settled Ms Bing's claim against them for £25,000. A reminder that employees can sue both the harasser and the employer. The award reflected the rather the harasser's attempts to develop a relationship with an employee by inviting her to lunch, then to Andorra for a holiday. Ms Bing went off sick in response and raised a grievance which led to the Mayor being de-chained by the Council. The now ex- Mayor made things much worse by issuing a press release giving details of the allegations and her home phone number, and implied she was not really sick.
"I'm fed up with you - you're fired"
In Smith v MacDonald Transport the Tribunal awarded £8500 to an employee who was sacked on the spot for basically standing up for himself. The interesting thing to note is that his actual lost wages were about £2000. The final award was £8500 because there was a 50% uplift for failure to call a formal dismissal hearing; 4 weeks pay (capped at £290 a week) because he hadn't been given a proper written statement of employment terms; 2 weeks pay because he hadn't been given a reason for his dismissal and 10.5 weeks pay because he was 60 and had served 7 years with the company.
Kentucky Fried Racism
The Sheffield Star reports an award of £2500 to a Manager at KFC who having complained about not being invited to a meeting was told "Maybe its because I'm being racist to a black woman". She complained and was not interviewed and appears to have been suspended without pay while the investigation took place. Another case for the "How not to" file.
Duty to make reasonable adjustments
In Routledge v TRW Systems a worker became sick with sleep-deprivation based depression after working alternate day/night shifts. He was advised by his GP to cease workihg nights so that he could get his body back into a normal pattern. The Tribunal decided his bosses had discriminated against him by faiiling to make a reasonable adjustment ie by not offering him a full time day job. No figures in the report on the award so watch this space.
Don't shoot the messenger...
In Chris Martin (not that one) v Parkam Food Group a Tribunal has found that a gay man who complained about graffiti in the work toilets which was abusive to him was entitled to resign and claim dismissal under the 2003 Equality Regulations because of the employers failure to deal with his complaints about it properly. 3 months after starting work he found a crude sexual drawing in the men’s toilets, in black marker pen with his name next to it. He complained; no action was taken; he wrote asking why not. The words “Chris Arse Martin” were then added to the graffiti. The company placed a warning notice in the toilets relating to graffiti but not to homophobic behaviour. He was suspended but the report does not say why. He resigned claiming constructive dismissal.
As an aside the Dewsbury Today reports this as a landmark case. Whenever you see this sloppy cliche ignore it - it usually means some pressure group is at work feeding text to lazy journalists.
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