News & Legal Updates

Brace yourselves, listeners. Simon and Jack discuss the case of Finn v The British Bung Manufacturing Company Limited where a colleague is referred to as a “stupid, old, bald ****”. Was it sex-related harassment? Or was it sexual harassment? And can you guess which of these two require to be bleeped out, when they mistakenly … Continue reading "Season 8: E3 | No Hair? Don’t Care | The Law Behind The Headlines | Employment Lawyer In Your Pocket"

The duty to make reasonable adjustments is unique to the protected characteristic of disability, and where the duty arises, an employer must take positive and proactive steps in order to avoid the substantial disadvantage caused to a disabled person in relation to a relevant matter in comparison with non-disabled persons by the application of provision, criterion or practice (PCP), a physical feature or the non-provision of an auxiliary aid.

In Episode 2 of Season 8, two become three as Simon, Jack and Ethan discuss the case of Thompson v Scancrown Limited. Can an employer refuse a flexible wrking request from a pregnant employee in the name of business needs? Does such a refusal discriminate against female employees? Hear all about Mr Sellar’s expensive maternity leave slip-up here…”

It is not usual for a decision taken by a fist instance Employment Tribunal to attract a huge amount of attention outside of the parties involved in the case. This is because decisions of tribunals are normally an application of existing law to the findings of fact made in regards to that particular claim. They will not create any binding authority which other tribunals or courts (or employers!) need to follow.

Show of hands please (or shares, likes or retweets, if you prefer): who is loving the Channel 4 drama, the Undeclared War, as much as I am? Saara Parvin is a computer science student and she’s just finished her second year at Imperial Colleague London when she joins the malware department at GCHQ on a one-year work experience placement. On her first day, a cyberattack hits, grinding the UK’s infrastructure to a halt. Without spoiling for you what’s then to follow, Saara finds a second virus nested inside another.

In the first episode of season 8, Simon and Jack discuss the case of Knox v Chief Constable of Merseyside Police. Can an employee lodge a claim for harassment on the basis of his colleague whistling Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 at him?

“Donna, did you leave this lying here? Can you just not put your rubbish in the bin?” My husband says this to me a lot. So often in fact that he’s stopped. Obviously fed up at repeating himself, he’s now taking photos and sending them to me in a move which is clearly intended to remind me of both my laziness and his frustration.

Background The Supreme Court has this week issued a judgement on entitlement to holiday pay which could affect potentially thousands of workers across the UK. Under the Working Time Regulations 1998 (“WTR”), workers are entitled to be paid for a minimum of 5.6 weeks (28 days for full time employees) paid annual leave every year. In the case in question, Lesley Brazel, a visiting music teacher at a school in Bedford, brought a claim against her employer (Harpur Trust) as a result of changes to the way in which the Trust calculated her holiday pay entitlement.

There will be employers reading this who, at one time or another, have felt frustrated because an employee’s absence left them short-staffed or otherwise disrupted the business. There may be employers reading this who have thought about reducing the potential for disruption by refusing to allow the employee to leave work to go home or even reducing the employee in question’s hours of work, but don’t be tempted to do so without first reading this cautionary tale of the employer who did just that and is now paying over £18, 000 in compensation and injury to feelings as a consequence.

Picture the scene. An employer approaches their friendly local employment lawyer for advice about how to manage an underperforming employee. The lawyer gives a very detailed and eloquent overview of the key requirements of a fair performance improvement procedure. The employer does not like the sound of this process and proceeds to ask: “can I not just make them redundant, then”? This sort of question always makes me, and I suspect other advisers, nervous.