Employment Law Cases

An employee dismissed for leaving work and refusing to return because of COVID-19-related concerns was not automatically unfairly dismissed.

A failure to make reasonable adjustments as part of a dismissal process doesn’t mean that the dismissal itself is necessarily unfair.

An employee who requests voluntary redundancy does not necessarily have no reasonable prospects of success in a claim for unfair dismissal.

Workers are not protected against being subject to a detriment by their employer for participating in industrial action.

Where an employee resigns and the employer brings forward the termination date by exercising its right to make a contractual payment in lieu of notice, there is no dismissal.

An ‘irreducible minimum of obligation’ is not a prerequisite of ‘worker’ status. Such a status will exist when an individual undertakes to do work personally for someone who isn’t a client or customer.

Regulation 13 of the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 gives agency workers a right to be informed of vacancies in the same terms as permanent workers: it does not give them a right to apply.

An employee could not make a claim for an unlawful deduction/underpayment of wages where he took up a more senior position but did not receive a contractual salary increase.

An employer has been prevented from firing and rehiring staff to remove a contractual entitlement to enhanced pay.

A worker who took unpaid holiday because his employer refused to pay for it accumulated the right to paid annual leave for which he was entitled to compensation on termination.

An employer’s derogatory and inappropriate remarks about a female employee’s age, in particular that she might be menopausal or be experiencing stereotypical menopausal symptoms, amounted to harassment on the grounds of sex and age.

Owner-driver franchisees who carried out delivery and collection services for DPD were neither employees nor workers.

An employer was neither directly or vicariously liable for injuries inflicted on one of its contractors by one of its employees playing a practical joke.

An employee’s dismissal for using a grievance process in a frivolous and vexatious manner was fair.

An employee had not been automatically unfairly dismissed because of her employer’s refusal to allow her to work from home during the pandemic. Her belief that there were circumstances of serious and imminent danger was not objectively reasonable given that her employer had assessed the risks and addressed the need for increased levels of hygiene and social distancing.

An employee’s dismissal for redundancy was unfair, in part because the employer hadn’t considered continuing her employment on furlough. If a genuine consultation had taken place which considered furlough and the available project work, she may not have been made redundant.

An employee had not agreed to an extension to the normal three-month time frame for deciding flexible working requests when he agreed to attend an appeal outside that three-month period.

Payments made by a driver to rent his vehicle and uniform should have been taken into account when working out whether he had been paid the National Minimum Wage (NMW).

An employer who directly offered its employees a package of revised terms and conditions - going over the head of the recognised trade union – unlawfully induced them to cease collective bargaining.

An employee who cared for her disabled mother was indirectly discriminated against on the grounds of disability, despite not having a disability herself.