Unfair dismissal
Employers should not be too hasty in holding a disciplinary hearing in an employee's absence, as this case demonstrates.
This case is a good example of how the dismissal of an employee for a failure to follow an important protocol or rule can be unfair where the protocol or rule was not communicated effectively in the first place.
The Court of Appeal has held that, for there to be an automatic unfair dismissal under TUPE, there does not need to have been a particular transfer or transferee in existence or in contemplation at the time of the dismissal.
This week's case of the week, provided by DLA Piper, covers dismissal due to long-term sickness absence.
A store manager for this large retailer took the wrong approach to a shift worker who insisted that she was not able to work on Christmas Eve, in a cautionary tale for employers that have strict rules requiring employees to work during the Christmas period.
This employment tribunal found that a police force fairly dismissed a police community support officer (PCSO) over the unexplained disappearance of £15, despite the circumstantial nature of the evidence against her.
In this case, the employer failed to meet its legal obligations to an employee who was a reservist returning from deployment in Afghanistan. The case was complicated by the fact that it was a client's refusal to have the employee back on site that resulted in his dismissal.
In this case, a small employer had to deal with a familiar problem for employers: what to do if employees' behaviour becomes unprofessional because they have fallen out with each other.
Tori O'Neil, Tessa Harland, Sarah Wade and Ed Gregory are associates at Addleshaw Goddard LLP. They round up the latest rulings.
The employer in this case took an extremely heavy-handed and, at times, frankly bizarre, approach to allegations that an employee "fraudulently" took one day's sick leave after he claimed that he had been stabbed in the finger by a syringe when sorting post.
HR and legal information and guidance relating to unfair dismissal.