Feb
Zero Hours, Zero Tolerance? There has been unease for some time over the use by employers of a "zero hours contract". Now, for the first time, employees and workers working under these contracts have some proper redress against employers who try to enforce provisions aimed at prohibiting their zero hour employees or...
Feb
Private emails at work - the latest twist “Furtive” is how many employers feel when they look at the private emails of a staff member who is the subject of a disciplinary investigation. The reason is the tension between an employer’s wish to check on what their employees are doing, and what...
Are you liable if you dismiss an employee working abroad? Once again the Courts have gently moved the goalposts that determine whether someone working abroad can bring an unfair dismissal or discrimination claim in the UK Employment Tribunals. Is the recent Olsen v. Gearbulk case below the final position (or just the...
Have faith - final warnings are useful. They are easily given, difficult to appeal and can be relied on. A tribunal can't generally look behind a final warning and if an employee with a final warning steps out of line again, even in a relatively minor way, they can legitimately be dismissed...
Collective redundancies just got more complicated… again. It's a shame, because they had become simpler after the Woolworths case confirmed that you only have to focus on establishments within a business (rather than on a business as a whole) when deciding whether to consult collectively in a redundancy situation. Problem: the trigger point...
Apr
In negotiating terms, "no" is possibly the most effective argument available to an employer, but as with all powerful tools, it is double edged and should be used with care. We have noticed an increasing trend amongst employers, particularly banks, which are going through a consolidation process, to provide a fixed...
Varying a contract of employment should be one of the simplest tasks. Apparently it isn't. It seems that there's no limit to the number of ways to get it wrong. Hot on the heels of my last comment on this topic in Wess v. Science Museum Group - where the employer got...
For those of you who like to know such things, these are the new rates for the main statutory payments and for the new capped amounts for compensation from 6th April 2015 onwards. The exception - one wonders why, but let's thank the Government anyway for this extra layer of complexity -...
Feb
.. made for a fair dismissal in the case of Game Retail Ltd v Laws - although it was the content and context of Mr Laws’ tweets that were the problem, not their number. This was one of them: ‘This week I have mainly been driving to towns the arse end of...
Finally we have (almost) official confirmation that the 20+ trigger for collective redundancies isn't relevant until the number of redundancies at individual sites each meets that threshold. But as the Ghost of Woolworths exits stage left (no doubt muttering "Collective redundancies - to consult, or not to consult: that is the question")...
