Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Chefs

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on April 21, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Charon QC, quoting The Prisoners Voice, quoting the Telegraph, reports on a case where a chef was prosecuted for hitting his brother over the head with a shovel following a row on whether or not Shepherd’s Pie properly comes with a layer of tomatoes on top. Of course it shouldn’t, but unfortunately sometimes does.

This reminded me that during my admittedly-high-volume employment law insured advice days, we had an extraordinary number of hotels and restaurants ring to say that their chefs were either mentally ill, or had been convicted of a violent offence, or often both. What is it about being a chef that triggers these mental problems? Has any research been done? Is it the job, or is it the predisposition of those it attracts?

I’d like some answers.

Affirmative Inaction

Published
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Usefully Employed
on March 19, 2008
in Uncategorized
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This is an interesting viewpoint (by Brian Cox on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site) on discrimination and “affirmative action” - a name I don’t like, although the term “positive discrimination” is no better.

It highlights the issue of what exactly we are trying to achieve with our discrimination legislation. Those in the private sector can’t use race as a characteristic when recruiting, and few would disagree with this. In the public sector it goes further than this: with race, for example, there is a duty on public sector employers to take steps to eliminate unlawful racial discrimination and to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups.

But how do you measure the results? What, from a concrete view, are you trying to achieve? The logic often used is that you should simply look at employment figures. If all our public sector employees are white, then surely there’s an impediment to ethnic minorities becoming civil servants. The shortcomings of this simplistic analysis are shown by looking at some extremes. Let’s take Leicester - one of the UK’s most diverse cities. Of its 280,000 inhabitants over 100,000 are non-white. Leicester is on target to be a city where whites form an ethnic minority by 2015. Its police service on the other hand has a mere 5.8% ethnic minority officers. Even allowing for the fact the constabulary covers the county as well, which will presumably be less diverse, this is a huge difference. The question is therefore why there are so few ethnic minority officers. The answer must be, as Brian Cox says, that they just don’t want to do it. Our attitudes are culturally provided, and at the risk of judging the issue by stereotypes the number of ethnic minority entrants into law, accountancy, pharmacy and other professions will be at a much higher proportion.

 So what do you want to do? Ensure equal opportunities, or modify people’s aspirations - basically social modelling? Is the latter even moral, let alone practical?

Schadenfreude

Published
by
Usefully Employed
on January 5, 2008
in Discrimination, Employment Tribunal, Lawyers, Rambling, Uncategorized 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.

Logan’s Run

Published
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Usefully Employed
on December 7, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Not many people realise you can still compulsorily retire someone at 65. Before you can though, you have to adopt some stupid procedure where you give them:

  • 6 months’ notice;
  • Invite them to come to a meeting at which they can ask to work longer (which you can just refuse because you hate them);
  • When they take offence, offer them an appeal (which you can find against them, because you hate them).

All the usual stuff about being accompanied  by trade union whatsits and so on applies as usual. What’s daft is if you don’t go through the rigmarole of all the meetings then the dismissal’s unfair, but at no point do you have to make a decision that’s at all reasonable. Sample meeting:

Old man: But I need my wages to live, please let me continue to work… I’ve worked here twenty years…
Director: No, I’m sorry, I’m confirming your retirement.
Old man: But why? In god’s name why?!
Director: I’m sick of the way you slurp your tea.
Old man: That’s ridiculous, I appeal!
 <the next week>
Managing Director: Sorry Old Man, your appeal is unsuccessful.
Old Man: But why?
Managing Director: Because I just feel like being a complete bastard today.

The madness of it all is that this dismissal is completely fair, yet the law requires the company to waste the Old Man’s time, and give him false hope, by putting him through a procedure. It’s this sort of tick-box law that doesn’t do anyone any good.

 Anyway, the reason for the post was that the Employment Tribunals have now ordered a stay on any cases which claim that a retirement dismissal is unfair. Unlucky retirees will now have to wait until the European Court of Justice decide if the UK is allowed to have a compulsory retirement age at all. More news on this in about a year’s time.