August 2024 Newsletter
I can’t believe it’s August already!
July, I attended a Branding Linkedin training course with the lovely Esther Partridge-Warner and Vanda Szabo. Please connect with these ladies as they have much to offer.
My Company Linkedin page is now up and running and I will be posting regularly on there with lots of useful information. Please take a moment to visit the page and give me a follow.
There has been a real mix of tribunal cases over the last few months, I have highlighted some below:
Recent tribunal outcomes:
- A Christian social worker has partly won his belief discrimination claim after a charity rescinded his job offer following the discovery of Facebook posts he had made expressing his views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
- A worker wins harassment claim because she received a birthday card! I normally say don’t be afraid of contacting staff who are off sick. But maybe contacting a member of staff 11 times in 3 weeks could be seen as harassment, throw in a birthday card and she wins her claim! The claimant was off sick for work-related stress and asked for minimal contact. The judge said:- “The effect of the repeated contact was to create a hostile and intimidating environment for the Claimant. She had said, in clear terms, that contact from the Respondent made her emotional. We have no difficulty in concluding that, subjectively, the effect for the repeated conduct was to create a hostile and intimidating environment for her”.
- A teenage baker was awarded £31k by a tribunal because she was hugged and touched on the ass by a colleague.
- A company that provides labour to farms did not have to pay workers the national minimum wage while they were travelling to work, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled. Judge Holly Stout said: “The workers while on the minibus were not working in any ordinary sense. They would have been free to talk, snooze, read and, if they had the necessary electronic devices, to listen to music, watch a film or spend their time applying for more agreeable employment. They were, in short, not working, but travelling for the purposes of the time work, which began on arrival at their destination and ceased when their poultry work was done and they awaited the minibus to take them home.”
- A head teacher who was unfairly dismissed after tapping her own child’s hand with her fingers has been awarded £102,300 by the employment tribunal.
- A mother has won more than £90,000 for sex discrimination after a prospective employer withdrew its job offer after asking how old her children were. The claimant was asked about the age of her children out of the blue in a meeting clearly designed to assess the claimant’s suitability for the post. The tribunal did not consider that a man would have been asked this same question. The tribunal found that she had been directly discriminated against because of her sex.
If you need to speak to me about any issues that have been highlighted in these cases, please give me a call on 07929506143.
Keep an eye on my Linkedin pages for further case law updates.
