Rojgar Job News

Here is another case about how far doing your God’s bidding in the workplace protects you from disciplinary action by your employer or, put more prosaically, about the relationship between the unfair dismissal regime and your rights to freedom of religion under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Ms Kuteh worked as a nurse for Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust. As a committed Christian she regularly took the opportunity presented by her work to talk to, or in some cases at, her patients about religion, specifically her religion and why they should share it. One was told immediately prior to his major bowel cancer surgery that if he prayed to God he would have a better chance of survival, while another, not unreasonably expecting the pre-operative assessment scheduled, found herself tackled instead on the true meaning of Easter. Complaints were made by patients and on 11 April 2016, Kuteh was told (and agreed) that she must not again “engage on the topic of r...

We have cautioned earlier in this series about allowing your PSC contractors to become integrated into your business so far as their outward projection to clients is concerned – describing them as part of “our team”, giving them business cards, company phones or invitations to the client party, and so on. Integration is something you actively aim for in respect of your employees (expect significant morale problems if you do not) and so is absolutely not something you want where you are trying to side-step “new” IR35’s hypothetical employment status from next April. But integration has inward-facing aspects too and these will be just as telling if HMRC comes calling. Application to PSC contractors of the same policies and procedures as you use for your employees is clearly to be avoided so far as you reasonably can. Some examples: Induction and Training – Remember that you are notionally hiring your PSC contractor as an external resource on the ...

Hot on the heels of a petition for new legislation aimed at preventing sexual harassment in the workplace, the Government has launched its consultation on the matter. The group behind the petition, called “This is Not Working”, is made up of unions, charities and women’s rights groups. The #ThisIsNotWorking campaign and the Government consultation stem from evidence that sexual harassment in the workplace remains a prevalent reality. In 2018 the Women and Equalities Committee produced a report on sexual harassment in the workplace. That report set out statistics gathered from various research surveys, including that 40% of women and 18% of men had experienced some form of unwanted sexual behaviour in the workplace. The consultation looks at whether current law provides the requisite protection in practice, whether there are any gaps and what else can be done to ensure people are properly protected at work. Steps towards protecting individuals from any form of unlawful ...

Exploring the difference between why you do something and why it happens sounds like one of those abstract A-level Philosophy questions about whether you are a prince dreaming you are a butterfly or the other way around, but without the ability to ask whether anyone cares anyway. However, the question is also key to determining a number of possible Employment Tribunal claims around retaliation, in particular for whistleblowing or trade union activity. Last year the Court of Appeal decided in Royal Mail –v- Jhuti that when looking at the grounds for someone’s dismissal the Employment Tribunal is “ obliged to consider only the mental processes of the person who was authorised to and did take the decision to dismiss “. In other words, if his own motivation was untainted by considerations of earlier protected disclosures or trade union activities, it did not matter if someone further back in the chain of causation leading to the dismissal had acted improperly on tho...

Here’s a question. Employee Mr U is accused of sexually assaulting A. She goes to the Police about it and simultaneously U’s employer starts an investigation into his conduct. The investigator J concludes that there is a case to answer, based in part on A having gone to the Police. On the back of J’s report, once issued, a disciplinary process is convened and U is summarily dismissed by a separate manager, F. Sounds all fair enough so far, yes? However, between the submission of J’s investigation report and F’s decision to dismiss, there was a development – after some hesitation about her story had been expressed by the Police, A withdrew her criminal allegations (as in “I don’t remember it happening”, rather than “It did happen but I don’t wish to pursue it”). J knew this but didn’t tell F before the dismissal decision was reached. That left decision-maker F with genuine and reasonable grounds to conclude tha...

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...

Neatly timed to coincide with the beginning of the end of lockdown, ACAS has this week has issued some new thoughts on the conduct of disciplinary and grievance proceedings during the pandemic.  Can or should you really run these things without the physical meetings referred to in generations of prior ACAS guidance? In these respects, this new advice unfortunately asks many more questions than it answers.  “ The employer needs to decide… “, it says repeatedly, or “ The employer must consider… “.  I am not sure either that much is really added to the sum of human wisdom by the cautionary note that “ In cases that might result in dismissal, the employer must always act fairly to avoid unfair dismissal”. The new ACAS advice makes it clear that the existing law remains unchanged, as does its own formal Code of Practice,  but remember that that Code is just a gloss upon The Law.  All that says is that the employer sh...