The Employment Appeal Tribunal has provided a reminder of how "establishment" should be defined for the purposes of consulting collectively on redundancies under s.188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.
This employer was told by the police that a non-negotiable condition of retaining the licence for its nightclub business, without which it would have to close, was the removal of an employee who had allegedly poorly handled incidents of violent crime in the nightclub.
Georgina Kyriacou and David Malamentenios are partners and Sandra Martins, Colin Makin and Krishna Santra are associates at Colman Coyle Solicitors. They round up the latest rulings.
In Woodcock v Cumbria Primary Care Trust [2012] IRLR 491 CA, the Court of Appeal held that the employer was justified in issuing a redundancy dismissal notice to an employee prior to formal consultation so as to avoid his remaining in its employment until his 50th birthday.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that the tribunal was correct to find that the respondent did not have an economic, technical or organisational (ETO) defence in respect of the two claimants, who were dismissed as a result of harmonisation following a post-TUPE transfer redundancy process.
In this case, the employment tribunal found that a worker, who had refused to work more than 48 hours per week, was automatically unfairly dismissed by his employer.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that, where the employer put an employee into a redundancy "pool of one" and did not consider the possibility of putting a wider pool of employees at risk of redundancy, the employment tribunal did not properly consider whether or not restricting the pool to one fell within the "range of reasonable responses".
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that an employer was in fundamental breach of contract when it indicated to an employee on long-term sick leave its settled intention to reduce his sick pay by 50%, which was in breach of a collective agreement.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has held that the employment tribunal was entitled to find that an employee was not constructively dismissed when he resigned after his manager unjustly took disciplinary action against him that was dropped after a swift and fair-minded investigation.