The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that, where there are multiple respondents and particular loss cannot be attributed to one party, employment tribunals must award compensation on a joint and several liability basis, meaning that the claimant can claim the entire amount from any respondent.
Claire Benson is managing associate and Helen Corbett, Sinead Jones, Helen Ward and Tori O'Neil are associates at Addleshaw Goddard LLP. They round up the latest rulings.
The Court of Appeal has held that the employment tribunal was wrong to assess compensation for a banker who was unfairly dismissed and suffered race discrimination on the basis that he would be unlikely to find an equivalent job again.
An adequate investigation and a fair system of warnings are key to the successful defence of an unfair dismissal claim related to misconduct, as this case shows.
In Todd v Strain and others [2011] IRLR 11 EAT, the EAT held that the duty to give employee representatives information about a forthcoming transfer applies even where there are no measures being proposed that give rise to a duty to consult the representatives. Informing individual employees rather than representatives did not amount to compliance with the information requirements, but should have led the tribunal to award less than the maximum compensation of 13 weeks' pay.
The industrial tribunal in Northern Ireland has awarded over £52,000 for sex and race discrimination after an employer ignored complaints from a Polish female worker that she was being subjected to serious sexual and racial harassment in the factory in which she worked.
In St Andrews Catholic Primary School and others v Blundell EAT/0330/09, the EAT held that the appropriate award of compensation for injury to a victimised employee's feelings was £14,000, not £22,000, reflecting that it was a serious case falling within the middle Vento band. The tribunal's award of £5,000 in aggravated damages was, however, appropriate.
The employer in this case was determined to get rid of an employee who was off sick for 11 months after an accident at work for which it admitted liability, leading to a finding of unfair dismissal.