Archive for the 'Rambling' Category

Employment Judges

Published
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Usefully Employed
on January 16, 2008
in Disciplinary, Dispute Resolution regulations, Employment Tribunal and Rambling
. 0 Comments

Employment tribunal chairmen are now renamed Employment Judges - a change which highlights the change in philosophy and attitude in the Tribunal, which seems to completely contrast with the changes occuring in the ‘normal’ courts system.

The tribunal is supposed to be informal, its procedures pragmatic, and its language accessible. So much so, in fact, that in normal circumstances you can’t get legal aid for an ET hearing no matter what your means. Yet look at the developments:

  • They’re now chaired by Judges;
  • In 2004 the existing 21 Tribunal Rules exploded to 61;
  • We have CMDs, PHRs, strike-outs, pre-acceptance procedures;
  • More costs orders against unreasonable litigants;
  • The utterly ridiculous ET1 forms:

Comment has been made in the past on the wording of the standard form ET1, which the Government insists all litigants must now complete in order to bring a claim before the Employment Tribunal. …those who design these forms may care to undertake basic instruction in employment law. - HHJ Peter Clark,  Ellis v Ministry of Defence UKEAT/0034/07

  • …not to mention the impossibility in the first year or two of submitting the blasted things without having to resort to filling them in by hand;
  • And let us not forget the convoluted and spectacular failure of the Dispute Resolution regulations, taking grievances - which had on occasion solved the problem - and transforming them into a legalistic over-technical minefield, together with obliterating the chance of anyone approaching them constructively.

So would we say the Tribunals are becoming more cuddly? Or less cuddly? A cynical view is that this sort of system leads to less hearings at the Tribunal, and thus less money spent, as one side or the other wins or loses on a technicality long before the Tribunal ever gets a chance to fully assess the merits of the case - or simply can’t face the attrition of yet another meeting. An even more cynical view is that the slow walk to enforced Acas-controlled or accredited mediation has even more risk attached of bumping up the legal bills.

Schadenfreude

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on January 5, 2008
in Discrimination, Employment Tribunal, Lawyers, Rambling and Unfair Dismissal
. 1 Comment

Celebrities and the media, who fancy each other so much that the flirting can make you sick, leave me wondering what the truth is. Newspapers are full of lies - “a source close to…” and “close personal friends” rarely exist, but the glitterati have little to moan about given that they court the attention when it’ll equal more dosh on the release of their next record. What you and I can rarely do is read a scandal sheet and quote it our friends as having any credibility at all.

Judges however, now they have credibility - amongst the public at least. Quiz time! Can you remember who a High Court judge is describing here?

To achieve what he wants without confrontation, he is manipulative and has resort to any means, fair or foul, to achieve his ends. … His success and character have combined to create a personality making him strong-willed and both accustomed to and insistent on getting his own way. He is petulant and given to sulking and walking away from situations whenever he considers himself thwarted. He is not ready to make concessions to others. He is a person who cannot tolerate either criticism or the exercise by management of authority over what he does. … He has the temperament of a prima donna. He always expects and demands compliance with his wishes. … When I asked him about the quality of his powers of recollection, he told me that indeed he did have a terrible memory. That part of his evidence I fully accept. Beyond this where it suited his purposes, he had resort to lies.

Yes, it’s the now-rehabilitated-Radio-2-presenting Chris Evans, suffering a character assassination in response to his attempts to sue for wrongful dismissal from Virgin Radio in 2003. What makes me really enjoy judicial celebrity bashing is that it’s always so well deserved; never having had anyone disagree with them for years, their ego pushes these people on to their own downfall. You see, you so rarely need to go to court. You can just settle. When you’re rich, you don’t need to go at all. Quite why anyone famous ever goes if they’ve got any chance of losing at all is baffling. They just end up looking like the (ginger) twats they are.

Fast forward to the present, and the lady with egg on her face is actress Trudie Styler, better perhaps known as wife of musician Sting. When her pregnant chef, Jane Martin, took a fortnight off with gastroenteritis, she had this to say:

Who the fuck does she think she is? She is my chef in the UK. She needs to be available if I need her, or she should re-think her position.

Nice. Bear in mind that this woman is employed to cook for Sting, Mrs Sting, and their family. And they had a sous-chef. One might think that they could last a fortnight without her. After taking her maternity leave (and on the SMP wages of £100-odd quid a week, mind you, you don’t stay rich by overpaying the domestics), Martin found a redundancy at-risk letter awaiting her. Sure, the other chef had one too, but only Martin’s contained a (sinister?) reference to the fact that when the Chauffeur had left they’d got a “gagging order” against him. When our poor chef was selected for redundancy, and brought her unfair dismissal / discrimination claim, this is what the Employment Tribunal had to say:

… the whole redundancy selection was a sham. It was contrived to cloak the Respondent’s actions with respectability which were transparently designed to dismiss her once she fell from favour with the Sumner family as a result of being less flexible about her work arrangements due to her pregnancy and then later by having a small child to consider. Her dismissal is directly linked to her pregnancy and taking of maternity leave. [It] was badly mishandled and conducted in such an incompetent manner that the true purpose shines through the subterfuge and calumnious actions seeking to suppress the true facts. [Mrs Sting's] involvement is clear. She is without doubt the driving force manipulating others to perform her ‘dirty work’ .

Doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it? But what is beyond belief is not that they did this in the first place, but that they turned down sheer number of chances they would have had to bung her a few thousand quid to go away and keep quiet. The eventual award - £25,000-ish - is nothing to them, and there’d have been no publicity. Now they’re in the papers. So what do you do if you’re Mrs Sting? Pay up and let it lie? Or appeal, because to say such nasty things about you the tribunal must have been biased? I refer you to my ego comments above.

So well done, Trudie Styler, Mrs Sting, now you’ve lost twice, and got in the papers twice. Due to appeals being reported, your own character is now writ large on the internet for all to see.

As well as finding another person for my list of who’s first against the wall when the revolution comes, it’s also quite nice to see here that the employer’s far superior legal resources did them naff all good in this case.

Mobile Madness

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on December 28, 2007
in Health & Safety and Rambling
. 0 Comments

Road safety campaigners dream of giving mobile phone use and speeding the same stigma that attaches to drink driving. If someone were to boast that they routinely drank four pints* then drove home they would neither win friends nor influence people (except perhaps to shun them), yet it seems to be perfectly legitimate to villainise speed cameras and admit to texting on the motorway.

Such a conversation will now usually be met by the other party relating the news that use of a mobile phone will land you in prison for two years - this is untrue, and all it represents is that prosecutors have been told to treat it as dangerous instead of careless driving. This will only become an issue if your mobile phone use is actually affecting your driving, and you’re only likely to see prison if the effect is ploughing into a bus queue. Criminal law is not my area of expertise however, and you’d do well to read these observations.

Employers should, if they’re careful, issue a dictat against illegal phone use by employees. This may go some way to save them from a prosecution themselves - entirely possible if they’ve ’caused or permitted’ the offence in the first place. No doubt if a company also routinely required their employees to answer their mobile phones while driving, a Health & Safety conviction wouldn’t be out of the question either.

*bizarrely enough (and strictly OT), four pints is the official level at which it becomes binge drinking, and therefore the level which the government campaign for people to stay underneath. I think that a campaigner asking some rowdy lads on a Saturday to stick to three pints is pissing into the wind, and I’d be surprised if four is enough in most people to trigger the public urination / assaults on police officers problem so enjoyed by TV programme makers. I’m not saying that it’s good for you, or OK, to drink more than that (although I’ve enjoyed doing so on occasion), just that if you take what is currently fairly average consumption, and attach the label ‘binge’ to it, then you just devalue the entire label and people stop listening to you at all. If they’d any sense they’d launch a national campaign telling boozy thick-necked men called Darren that ten (or maybe even twelve) units should be their limit on a night out. This equates to five or six pints, enough to get lary and have a good time, but not enough to be sick all over someone else’s shoes then pre-emptively punch him in the face.

It’s not ideal, but at least it would be a clear and achievable guideline, something health campaigners seem utterly unable to produce.

How much public money did all this cost?

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on December 18, 2007
in Discrimination and Rambling
. 0 Comments

Brian & Vulva from SpacedBrian & Vulva from SpacedBrian & Vulva from Spaced 

The Employment Appeal Tribunal took part in some performance theatre last month - no writhing around in a leotard with a goldfish bowl on their head though, and no walking round in animal suits. Such things are unbecoming to a Circuit Judge. Instead they heard the appeal of Anthony Padgett. He applied to the Tate Modern for a commission for an installation where he would build a replica of the gallery’s founder Sir Henry Tate’s memorial, found at Normanton Cemetery, entirely out of sugar lumps.

Whether or not this is good art I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking it would have looked better if he had built a replica of the man himself. Padgett’s application included the fact that he, like Tate himself, was a Unitarian. On his application being rejected, the gallery presumably couldn’t have been more surprised to receive a complaint that theyhad discriminated against him on the grounds of his religion. His requested compensation was a shortlisting for the 2005 Turner prize, the work of art being the complaint itself.

You can read the judgment (it’s refreshingly short) or, better, watch Padgett bless his case papers before going into the appeal. In a nutshell, he lost because this sort of discrimination is still only aimed at employment relationships. If you have a job, or are applying for a job, you get protection. Writing (more or less speculatively) to a gallery asking for a few square metres of space and some money please isn’t close enough.

You may conclude I’m being unduly critical of Padgett, but I do feel impatient with those who represent an everyday action as having artistic value because they’re doing it. Padgett has either applied for something, been told he’s no good, had a hissy fit and claimed discrimination, or is pretending that this is the case in the name of art. If it’s the former then he hasn’t done anything different to hundreds of people filling in tribunal forms every day, so where has he innovated? Where is the art, beyond that expressed by ordinary people, which justifies a Turner nomination? If he’s pretending to be aggrieved, then those who suffer real discrimination, and have had their remedies hijacked in the name of Padgett’s ego, can be justifiably insulted.

Timber!

Published
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Usefully Employed
on December 6, 2007
in Health & Safety and Rambling
. 0 Comments

This article is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Not the law - although it’s easy to have doubts when the National Trust are prosecuted for letting one of their six million trees fall down - it’s the terrible journalism. What this article really says is… send your employees go-karting and if one of them is killed your company will be fined millions of pounds. This is rubbish, and ignores the legislation completely. Can it really be said that if you book your employees a day out with a respectable outdoor pursuits company - and maybe even double check that they’re insured and have a health & safety policy - and someone is killed that the company is guilty of a gross breach of its duty of care? Will any juries really come to this conclusion? No. The article is really a disguised advert for Croner Consulting, so that they can sell Health & Safety solutions to panicked employers. In fact, it’s a bit like this other Times article which is a scare-mongering disguised advert for Peninsula, a similar company. It contains at least one legal error - can you spot it? I used to like the Times, but some of their recent articles make me want to vomit.

Religion & Politics

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on December 1, 2007
in Discrimination and Rambling
. 0 Comments

…shouldn’t be discussed at work. If I’m ever (god forbid) a boss of anyone at all, I’ll immediately dictate that within the workplace, no topics are to ever be discussed if they’re not relevant to making me money. Should an employee be so lucky as to enter my intimate circle, a contrary ban on shop talk will be effective in the pub.

You see, we have to go to work. When our social or public life is full of people talking offensive nonsense, we can engage, disagree, protest, argue, or simply ignore. At work when someone starts spouting off you can’t get away from them and still pay the bills each month, and life suddenly becomes just a little bit more miserable. One of my favourite bloggers, who is a Victorian Maiden no less, talks a great deal of sense here about the recent row in the Sudan. All of her points hold true, but not, I’m afraid, in the workplace. There, you do have a right not to be subjected to anything that (at least from a half-reasonable point of view) you find offensive.