Content
U-Turns Galore
Premises, Promises
Filing Bonus
RIP: 0% Rate
His and Hers
Party Spirit
State Of The Union
VAT's The Point?
Going Dutch
Away Win For Revenue
WIP-Round
The Best Land Plans
Tax Free Gizmos
Where Theres A Will
Do You Work Here?
Out Of The Shadows
Sacrifice Works
Home Sweet Office
Sauce For The Goose
Blissful Ignorance
PC Or Not PC?
Lost On Penalties
Worth The Paper
Carry The Can
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Some of the laws that employers have to comply with may seem like "political correctness gone mad", or just a minefield that you have to tiptoe through while unscrupulous employees play the system. But some of the cases show that there are employers who act unreasonably and employees who need protecting. In an ideal world, each side would deal fairly with the other and we wouldn't need the rules - in this world, we all have to be careful. In one recent case, a woman was found to have been subjected to bullying and harassment after she became pregnant. That's sex discrimination under the law, and the employer was found liable to compensate her. The striking thing about the case was that the employment tribunal made her immediate manager, who appears to have encouraged the intimidatory atmosphere, jointly liable with the business. This is unusual: normally the employer is responsible for what the employees do, and the employer therefore has to make sure the employees are behaving properly. Here, they were both going to have to pay. It's only recently that discrimination on account of sexual orientation has become a specific ground for compensation for employees. In a recent case, a manager passed around gossip that one of his workers was gay when the worker would have preferred to keep this secret - this led to bullying, which led to absence, which led to the sack. The company was held to have discriminated against the worker and had to compensate him. The law has for a while outlawed discrimination on the grounds of married status. In a recent case, an employee claimed this even though she was not married - she was only engaged. The employment tribunal decided that was within the law and upheld her claim. It's a tricky business being an employer - the main thing is to be very careful. You may feel sometimes that you are being taken advantage of when you bend over backwards to be fair to someone, but you expose yourself to much worse problems if you fail to do that. |
© Bayar Hughes & Co., 2010.