Employment Law Cases

An employer was liable to pay the level of income protection payments set out in an offer letter and summary of benefits provided by the employee’s original employer prior to a TUPE transfer, even though those benefits were no longer covered under the employer’s insurance policy.

An employer was entitled to dismiss and offer to re-engage employees on new terms (fire and rehire) to remove pay protection it had originally referred to as ‘permanent’. An earlier injunction preventing it from doing so was overturned.

Entitlement to holiday pay under the Working Time Regulations 1998 does not need to be pro-rated for part-year workers

An employee’s belief that a person cannot change their sex/gender at will, and his lack of belief in ‘transgenderism’, were protected under the Equality Act 2010. However, a tribunal had correctly held that his employer’s response to his refusal to use transgender service users’ preferred pronouns was not direct or indirect discrimination or harassment.

A failure to give a disabled employee a reasonable trial in a role at a different location meant that the employer could not show that her dismissal was objectively justified.

A fundamental breach of contract can be established even where the employer’s actions do not indicate an intention to end the employment relationship.

An employer’s imposition of a pay award, at a time when negotiations with the union were stalled, was an unlawful inducement.

A complete lack of any consultation or selection process, allied to notifying staff of redundancies via a Facebook post, led to unfair dismissal.

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.

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.

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.