I have often written about the surprising extent to which protection is available from discrimination on the ground of religion or belief or, for that matter because of having no religion or belief. It is therefore perhaps surprising that one of the central tenets of Christian faith, rest on a Sunday, is not something to…
The case of Crawford and Another v Suffolk Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust, recently considered by the Court of Appeal, appears on its face to be concerned with relatively straightforward issues resulting from dismissals for gross misconduct following alleged mishandling of patients, particularly the deployment of a “safe handling technique” which had caused open skin…
Arriva London South Ltd v Nicolaou concerned a bus driver who complained that his employers were imposing an unlawful detriment when they withdrew rest day overtime from him. The decision was made under a policy of only giving overtime to those workers who had agreed to opt out of the 48 hour maximum working week.…
In Edwards v Chesterfield Royal Hospital and Botham (FC) v Ministry of Defence the Supreme Court revisited the question of whether, over and above any right to compensation for unfair dismissal, employees can recover damages for the way in which they have been dismissed and specifically in the situation where the employer has failed to…
To add to the panoply of TUPE cases, we have four useful decisions this month which illustrate the impact of the Regulations. Three out of the four, Enterprise, Pannu and Hunter, all deal with the scope of the rules applying TUPE to service provision changes (SPCs), which, as all our regular readers know, are not…
The Equality Act 2010, like its predecessors, protects those with the protected characteristic of marriage from discrimination on the ground of that characteristic. Does this concept, originally introduced to deal with the outmoded practice of dismissing women as soon as they married, which still continued into the 1960s, have any current relevance in the 21st…
Offshore workers in the oil and gas industries generally work on a ”two weeks on, two weeks off” shift basis. In Russell & Ors v Transocean International Resources Ltd & Ors (Scotland), offshore workers, whose contracts required that they take their leave during periods when they were ashore, unsuccessfully sought to establish that they were entitled…
Domestic workers living as part of the family for whom they work can fall under the “au pairs and nannies” exception to the right to be paid minimum wage. Other exceptions listed in the Regulations include members of the armed forces, share fishermen, prisoners and, fairly obviously, volunteers and the self-employed. Of course, interns or…
We reported last month the increases in limits for unfair dismissal compensation and calculation of a week’s pay for redundancy and other purposes. The full changes have now been published and are as follows: – Maximum compensatory award for unfair dismissal: £72,300 (no maximum in discrimination cases) – Maximum unfair dismissal basic award/redundancy payment: £12,900…