Rojgar Job News

You have tried to counsel, to mediate and to make every adjustment you possibly can, but in the end you have run into a single insurmountable fact about your employee with the attitude – you just can’t bear him any longer. He is the dragging anchor of your otherwise happy little ship and must be cut loose for everyone’s benefit, potentially including his own. We know that Employment Tribunals get very sticky about conduct or performance cases dressed up to look like “some other substantial reason” loss of trust and confidence clashes. The ETs see this (often entirely properly) as the employer’s attempt to side-step the usual fair dismissal requirements of prior warnings, time to improve, etc. To the extent that your employee’s attitude problem manifested itself primarily through conduct or performance, that is what you should ideally do. This is partly because it might take the shock of formal procedures to jolt your employee out of whatever dar...

If one of your employees is arrested and charged with something more than usually distressing and distasteful, the question will inevitably come up of whether he can be dismissed. The driver for that inquiry will often be a fear on the employer’s part of adverse publicity arising from its continued employment of him against that background. The trial might easily be a year away, so what else are you to do in the meantime? Suspension on pay for such a period is hardly viable, any more than suspension without. So can you dismiss for conduct which the employee may well be ultimately be found not to have committed (and which you yourself may not even believe in), but where the prospective impact on corporate reputation could nonetheless be significant? Time to go back to The Law. For a fair dismissal the employer needs to show that termination would be within the “range of reasonable responses” to the situation in which it finds itself. Generally in these cases it will pro...