Tag Archives: constructive dismissal

Rearranging The Desks

Rearranging The Desks

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One of the things that concerns many small businesses in relation to employment law is the issue of constructive dismissal. A perception has grown up around the concept that if a business makes any change that an employee doesn’t like, they can resign and take the company to a tribunal. This perception isn’t helped by stories like this from The Guardian, especially its clickbait headline “Senior staff can sue if given ‘low status’ desk, UK tribunal rules”

Of course, the headline isn’t true and the story is far more complex. But it’s a useful one to look at since it covers a lot of issues that a small business might face when dealing with a change.

Firstly, what is constructive dismissal? It’s the idea that an employer makes a significant detrimental change to an employee’s terms, conditions or position that the employee can consider that they have effectively been dismissed and resign on the spot. It is in many ways the reverse of gross misconduct, which is where an employee does something so serious that the employer considers that dismissal without notice is the appropriate solution.

In some situations, constructive dismissal can be triggered by the ‘final straw’ in a series of changes. That’s in part what happened in this case.

The claimant, a Mr Walker, was a manager of a branch of an estate agents. He was moved without discussion to a smaller branch and given – again without discussion – a revised pay package. To achieve a similar level of salary he would have to hit more demanding targets. A couple of months later, he was required to return to his original branch in what was termed a joint managerial role, but which required him to sit with the majority of staff in the main office rather than at the manager’s desk. He considered this to be a demotion and considered that it would be difficult and embarrassing to have to sit among staff he had formerly managed. When he raised this with his Director, the director dismissed his concerns with a comment that he couldn’t believe someone of Mr Walker’s age would make a fuss about a desk (there was some dispute about whether the Director swore in this conversation). Mr Walker considered this the final straw, and resigned claiming constructive dismissal.

There are three key learning points from this for small businesses:

  • If you are making a change which has a negative impact on someone – even if they are in a senior role – discuss and (where possible) agree the way forward. Don’t just impose it.
  • Consider your company culture. In some businesses, where people sit would not be an issue. But if status is conveyed by office location, type of desk or anything else, taking that away will clearly indicate to people in the organisation that the individual’s status has been downgraded.
  • The Estate Agents had an external HR adviser who gave advice on how to handle the situation. The advice was not necessarily incorrect but was based on partial information (what the Director thought was important for her to know) and as result made the situation worse. Always tell your HR adviser (for my clients that means me ) the full story, even the bits that you don’t think are valid.

Constructive dismissal is actually very rare (in a 40 year HR career I’ve dealt with 2 cases and I don’t think that I am unusual in that). But you can make it rarer still by following the steps above.

A businessman in a suit sitting in an office, looking concerned, with colleagues working at desks in the background.

If we took a holiday it would be so nice

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Conservative Prime Ministerial hopeful Jeremy Hunt caused a stir this week when he announced that, if elected, he would cancel all Civil Service holidays in August in order to make sure that preparations for a No-Deal Brexit were fully implemented. But can an employer simply just cancel holidays, especially if they have already been authorised and staff may have paid out for a trip away?

It may surprise you, but legally the answer is yes. In fact, in certain sectors (e.g. the NHS or emergency services) it’s not that uncommon – think for example of nurses and doctors having leave cancelled because of a winter flu epidemic.

However, it’s not quite that straightforward. Firstly, there are minimum periods of notice which must be given to cancel someone’s holidays. Unless you have a different written agreement, this is the same length of time as the period of the holiday. So someone who’d booked a fortnight’s leave must be given two weeks’ notice of cancellation.  As the new Prime Minister is only expected to take office a week before the beginning of August, and unless the Civil Service has specific rules, Mr Hunt would not have time to stop someone taking two weeks off at the beginning of August.

Secondly, you need to have a clear and urgent business reason. Preparing for an imminent ‘disorderly’ departure from the EU in 12 weeks would probably fit this description, as might things like a high level of staff sickness, or a major and unexpected change in business. If you don’t have a valid reason, however, you might find yourself facing a claim for constructive dismissal.

Thirdly, cancelling someone’s holiday is not likely to motivate or endear them to your business. So you need to balance the short-term issue against the longer-term impacts.

This post doesn’t cover the issue of whether you are liable to compensate people for losses caused by a cancellation. Most travel insurance policies wouldn’t cover cancellation by the employer, potentially leaving your staff significantly out of pocket. Not being a lawyer, I can’t say whether individuals would have grounds to make a civil claim for their loss (if you are a lawyer reading this please feel free to comment) but if they can you might find yourself exposed to significant liabilities.

So, overall, cancelling holidays is something that can be done, but it is an extreme decision to take and would require extreme circumstances, and a proper evaluation of the pros and cons, before I would suggest you do it. As with so much of employment law, the rule is

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”

via GIPHY

 

Left Holding the Baby (and other employment problems)

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There are certain questions that crop up regularly among my small business clients, and while every circumstance is slightly different, here’s some advice on how to approach some of these common issues if they occur in your organisation

I’ve an employee who always seems to need time off because of problems with her toddler. Last week she took two days off because he had an upset stomach. Her colleagues are getting a bit fed up with covering for her.

First of all, your employee has a legal right to take unpaid time off if an emergency situation arises with a dependant. This right is restricted to genuine emergencies (for example, if nursery ring to say the child is sick and needs to be collected) and not known issues (such as a hospital appointment for the child), and is also restricted to the time required to put in place alternative arrangements – which depending on the circumstances might be anything from an hour to a day – not to provide the care itself. It would be unusual for an ‘emergency’ to last more than a day. If the individual does need more time off, you may be prepared to allow them to take holidays or some other arrangement, but this is at your discretion.

If the employee seems to have ‘emergencies’ regularly, you can discuss with them the situation and look at ways of resolving it. Current case law suggests that the employee is not entitled to an unlimited use of this right. Consider ways that you might be able to get around the situation – for example short-term changes to working hours, or some other flexible arrangement. In the case of childcare particularly, you might want to discreetly find out if the employee’s partner could assist more (often in these cases it is the mum who ends up dealing with the problem every time, not the dad).

My business trades a lot with the EU and we’re badly affected by Brexit. A few members of our staff are vocally pro-Brexit. Can I sack them for promoting something which is damaging their employer?

Probably not. Although political views are not a ‘protected characteristic’ under the Equality Act, if someone feels they have been dismissed for holding a political opinion they can make an unfair dismissal claim even if they don’t have the normal two years’ service. You would have to have to show that dismissal was a reasonable response – and given that it’s unlikely that you can directly blame your employees for the current situation, it would be difficult to substantiate this.

What you can do is make it clear that people should not be using the workplace to promote political views. Someone who repeatedly broke this rule could be taken through the disciplinary procedure and ultimately dismissed. Make sure you apply the rule consistently though, not just against views that you disagree with!

I’m closing down part of my business in a few months and told the one employee in this area he’d be losing his job, and that he would be doing lower paid work somewhere else in the business. He got very irate and walked off the job, and has never returned. Now he’s threatening constructive dismissal – does he have a case?

Unless you were particularly abrupt or unpleasant in the way you told him or did it in a humiliating way (announcing it unexpectedly in front of colleagues for example), it’s unlikely. You are however putting him at risk of redundancy and needed to consult with him – including on whether the alternative work is suitable (if lower paid, it’s unlikely to be). That could leave you at risk of an unfair dismissal claim if the employee has more than 2 years’ service. As he’s walked off before you could undertake proper consultation, or even give him his legal notice, you are likely to have a defence against a claim, but it could get messy and time-consuming. If he does make a claim, consider settling through ACAS early conciliation or via a Settlement Agreement.

MPs and Constructive Dismissal

MPs and Constructive Dismissal

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One of the side products of this week’s decision by a group of Tory and Labour MPs to quit their parties and sit as an independent group was a somewhat heated discussion on parts of social media as to whether some of them, particularly Liverpool Wavertree MP Luciana Berger, would be able to claim constructive dismissal over their alleged treatment by their party organisations.

The first thing to say is that MPs are not employees of their political parties, so the simple answer is no. But as constructive dismissal is something that worries many small employers, it’s worth clarifying what it is – and isn’t.

Constructive dismissal is behaviour by the employer that is so awful that the employee can consider that they no longer have any trust or confidence in the organisation they work for and resigns as a consequence. It can be thought of in some respects as the opposite of gross misconduct (a situation where an employee commits an act that the employer can no longer have any trust or confidence in them, e.g. stealing, assault, leaking commercial secrets to a competitor etc).

It could be a single act by an employer, such as unilaterally reducing someone’s pay or demoting them to a lower grade. It might be humiliating someone in the presence of their colleagues and subordinates (this Gordon Ramsay clip is a good example – warning contains strong language). It can also be the final straw in a series of events which allows the person to conclude they can no longer work there.

It’s also worth remembering that an employer is responsible for the behaviour of their staff. So, if an organisation ignored or failed to deal with allegations of bullying, harassment, insulting or threatening behaviour against an individual employee by their colleagues, which then led to the individual resigning, they could be deemed to have constructively dismissed the employee.

Constructive dismissal isn’t a situation where an employer makes a decision that the employee is unhappy about (I’ve been asked questions about in the past about whether making someone move from a private to a shared office could be constructive dismissal for example – it wasn’t). And remember that if the person doesn’t resign there can be no constructive dismissal.

Constructive dismissal is also quite rare. There are, I think, two reasons for this. The first is that it takes a lot of courage, even in a very difficult situation, to simply walk out of a job.  The second is that to win a case at a tribunal, the onus is on the employee to show that the employer’s actions were such that they were justified in resigning, rather than a normal unfair dismissal where the onus is on the employer to show that its decision was fair and reasonable.  Even though the case is – like all employment matters – decided on the balance of probability (what the judge thinks is the most credible explanation of events) rather than the criminal standard of absolute proof, it still puts an additional hurdle in the way of a successful claim.

Based solely on the reports and social media postings I have seen, had she been an employee then Ms Berger certainly would have strong grounds for a claim. Whether she would have succeeded would have been up to a tribunal judge to decide. But it’s a useful reminder to employers that trying to ‘force’ someone  (or allowing colleagues to force them) out of an organisation can have far-reaching consequences.

Gordon Ramsay