June has seen the UK bask in some of the best weather we have experienced in years, with temperatures making the UK feel like a tropical island, but weather aside, June has been full of important employment law cases that have passed through our courts.
A railway employee who worked as a crossing keeper was not unfairly sacked after he admitted that he bumped a car with a crossing barrier in order to teach the driver a lesson, a south London employment tribunal has ruled.
Mr. McKay who was an employee for Network Rail as a crossing keeper for 13 years until he was dismissed in January 2018 following allegations of gross misconduct. The allegations were surrounding a car that he believed had failed to respect the crossings warning alarms.
McKay claimed that he was unfairly dismissed at an employment tribunal, however the judge presiding over the case ruled that this was not the case and that Network Rail had acted with reasonable grounds when dismissing McKay and carried out a fair investigation that led to this conclusion.
An employee of a supermarket has been told that he was unfairly dismissed by a Scottish Tribunal after managers carried out an unfair and flawed investigation after it was reported that he send inappropriate messages to a 17 year old colleague.
The Dundee Tribunal heard that various managers had carried out investigations into the messages sent over Facebook and also in person, but failed to do it in a fair manner ruled the judge. The judge stated that the outcome of the investigation and resulting disciplinary had tainted after one manager decided that the claimant was ‘some sort of sexual predator’ prior to the meetings.
An employee of Transport for London has won a discrimination and victimisation case after he was told by his manager that he was not allowed to take part in training and conference calls due to the fact that English was not his first language.
The South London tribunal judged that Mr. Khawaja, a Pakistani man employed as a tunnel traffic coordinator on the tube network, had be treated less fairly and less favorably by his manager because of his race when it came to the allocation of training opportunities in the form of huddles and conference calls.
The judge presiding over the case decided that Khawaja had been the victim of direct discrimination, victimisation and had suffered from unauthorised deduction of wages.
A dyslexic helpline worker was unfairly dismissed, ruled a Sheffield tribunal, after his employer didn’t allow him to move to a different role answering questions and queries via an instant messaging platform.
Mr. Bullos, who was an adviser for the homeless charity Shelter, was reassigned roles and moved back to answering queries via telephone after his manager flagged numerous spelling and grammatical errors in his web chats with the service users during a trial with the new team.
However, the employment tribunal stated that just because Bullos’s job description included answering queries via both web chat and telephone, it should not mean that an employee with a disability eager to undertake web chat work should be denied reasonable adjustments and instead be moved to a team where there was telephone work only. The tribunal ruled that he had been unfairly dismissed, discriminated against due to his disability and also harassed by his former employer and therefore the judge awarded Bullos £28,324.
An employee at a crematorium has been awarded £6,846 in compensation for religious discrimination and harassment after a colleague said that “white people wouldn’t want to be buried next to a Muslim”.
Lehla Aboulossoud, who was an administrative worker at Eltham crematorium in south London, complained after a manager made numerous offensive comments regarding Muslims.
A south London tribunal ruled that the following investigation gave no thought to the issues of religious harassment or discrimination and instead focused solely on whether the offensive language was used directly at Aboulossoud, failing to recognize “the fact of religious associative discrimination and harassment and the impact of this on the claimant”. The tribunal found that the comments were not made directly at the claimant, however the details of the case showed that it still fell within the remits of religious harassment and discrimination.
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