Equality, diversity and human rights
In Lewen v Denda, the European Court of Justice rules that, where a bonus that is paid voluntarily as an exceptional allowance at Christmas is awarded retroactively as pay for work done, an employer is precluded by Article 141 of the Treaty of Rome from excluding female workers on parental leave entirely from the benefit of the bonus, without taking account of the work done. But an employer may lawfully refuse to pay such a bonus to a woman on parental leave where that payment is subject only to her being in active employment.
An employer contravened the principle of equal pay for equal work contained in Article 141 of the Treaty of Rome when it paid a part-time employee who attended a full-time union training course her normal part-time pay rather than payment for the hours actually spent attending the course, holds the EAT in Davies v Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council.
Where there is an unbroken chain of contracts between an individual and an end user, the end user should be regarded as the "principal" within the meaning of the contract-worker provisions contained in s.12 of the Disability Discrimination Act, the EAT holds in MHC Consulting Services Ltd v Tansell and others.
In Vicary v British Telecommunications plc, the EAT holds that an employment tribunal's conclusion that a woman did not have a disability for the purposes of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was perverse.
In Davies v Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) uses EC equal pay law to rule that an employer has to pay a trade union health and safety representative for all five days of a training course, even though it employs her on a part-time basis.
An employee diagnosed as suffering from reactive depression was a "disabled person" within the meaning of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, holds the EAT in Kapadia v London Borough of Lambeth.
Calculating severance payments by reference to length of service and final pay, so that a part-time employee who had previously worked full time did not have her full-time service reflected in her severance payment, was not discriminatory, holds the House of Lords in Barry v Midland Bank plc.
Employment tribunals have jurisdiction to award compensation for the statutory tort of unlawful racial discrimination under the Race Relations Act, including damages for physical or psychiatric injury caused by the tort, holds the Court of Appeal in Sheriff v Klyne Tugs (Lowestoft) Ltd.
In Stubbs v (1) Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police and (2) Walker a Nottingham employment tribunal (Chair: D R Sneath) reconvenes to award compensation of £182,000, including £41,500 for injury to feelings and injury to health to a former detective retired from the police force on ill-health grounds following its ruling that she had been subject to a lengthy period of sexual harassment and discrimination by her line manager.
It was a sufficient basis for a claim of victimisation for an unsuccessful job applicant to show that those who had interviewed him were subconsciously influenced by their knowledge of the fact that he had previously done a protected act, holds the House of Lords in Nagarajan v London Regional Transport.
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