Illegal working and eligibility for employment protection is another topic which seems to have been keeping the courts busy this year. Possibly a reflection of a wider issue concerning the composition of the workforce, some of the working practices which have been disclosed in these cases give serious cause for concern.
In March we reported the decision in Zarkasi v Anindita and anor [2012] UKEAT in which a race discrimination claim by an au pair who had entered the UK to work using falsified documents failed, because the unfavourable treatment related not to her race but to her lack of any right to live or work in the UK. Hounga v Allen & Anor [2012] EWCA Civ 609 is a decision of the Court of Appeal concerning a similar situation, which arrives at the same result by a different route based on earlier Court of Appeal decisions on illegal contracts, including Hall v Woolston Hall Leisure Ltd (2001) and Vakante v Governing Body of Addey and Stanhope School (No 2) (2005).
Ms Hounga, with help from others (she being illiterate), obtained a passport in a false name in Nigeria and entered the UK on a 6 month visitor’s visa, ostensibly to visit her grandmother (who, if she existed at all, did not live in the UK), but in fact to take up a job arranged for her here as an au pair for a family with connections in Nigeria.
