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A personal injury, whether suffered in an accident at work or in a Road Traffic Accident (RTA), or “merely” just a slip or trip in the street can be a serious, even devastating blow. Lives can be significantly impacted by injury, not just in terms of pain and suffering but also loss of earnings, treatment fees and, in the most serious cases, care and adaptations round the home when someone is left disabled as a result.
Now that the riots have passed away, thanks in no small part to the rain and a lot of police, the inquests can start. And the legal proceedings. Police cells in London are said to be full to brimming with rioters and Magistrates Courts sitting all night and all weekend to get through the numbers being prosecuted. The airwaves and news media are thick with demands for retribution against the participants, for benefits to be cut and for evictions from social housing. Last week the Evening Standard carried a front page alleging that a teaching assistant had been arrested for participating in the riots. More such stories will surely follow and whilst it would be wrong to speculate on what might happen to any one particular person, are the Employment Tribunals going to get very busy over the next few months dealing with dismissed employees, leaving aside the issue that many rioters may have been unemployed or, scarily, beneath working age.
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A US railroad company, Metro-North, has been ordered to pay an employee damages in excess of $142,000. In addition, the company must promote him to a senior level as it was concluded that the worker was denied promotion because of a knee injury sustained whilst at work.
Metro-North railroad were found by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to have wrongly classified the injury as being completely unrelated to work, when in fact the injury took place whilst Mr Bill Ordner was on his lunch break.
Cyberslacking is the term given to people who spend their worktime surfing the
net, doing their shopping, checking football scores or booking a holiday. In fact, doing anything on the net that isn’t related to their jobs. Like you reading this now, probably.
Civil servants in Northern Ireland have allegedly been busy shopping, reading football stories and even planning holidays in the sun while they were supposed to be working.
Last week I read a brief summary about a case where personal injury and family law crashed together in the Court of Appeal . I’ve not read the full case itself and if anyone has the link to it I’d be very interested to read it. It’s a surprising case because one of the parties, Mr Mansfield had suffered serious personal injuries when hit by a car in an accident in 1992 and had been awarded £500,000 for the loss of a leg and serious spinal injuries. The couple got together five years after the award was made to him which, if the remnants of my knowledge of matrimonial law still holds good, means that it was property acquired before the marriage and thus not a matrimonial asset. I’d welcome any comments from any Family lawyers out there reading this who can explain it.
Given the appalling events unfolding in London as I write this, it seems completely trivial to talk about extortion and implying criminal behaviour in the settlement of employment disputes, however on Sunday The Telegraph reported about a massive costs award in favour of one Tim Watts following his defeat of a sex discrimination claim against him by one of his former employees. Under an article entitled ‘Employment tribunals are legalised extortion’ he sets out his view that Employment legislation is too complex and offers far too many opportunities to employees who decide they want to have a go;
The villain of the piece
Please forgive me for writing a second post on “Clarriegate” but leaving aside the actual issues of who what when etc, it occurred to me that the main focus of this story, to my mind anyway, is how a business can recover from a devastating blow like this. Is it possible at all and if they can survive will they have to rebrand to distance themselves from the “old business”?.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-dum-de-dum-dum-de-da-da
Listeners to The Archers will know that, finally, there is a really good story line being played out at the moment. The Ambridge Organic Dairy, purveyors of ice-cream, cheese and yoghurt run by the terminally wet Tony and insufferably smug Pat Archer (Pol Pat to listeners)has been hit by an outbreak of ecoli, which infected several people at a Country Fair, including two small children who have been hospitalised as a result.
Ambridge Organic faces ruin as a result, not just from having their products taken off sale everywhere but from the prospect of being sued by the victims. Couldn’t happen to nicer (fictitional) people.
[This is the follow up piece to my article "Social Media in the Workplace" published on this blog last Saturday and, originally, in The Internet Newsletter for Lawyers/Law 2.0]
In my last article I wrote about the potential threats that face employers from the use by employees of social media and recommended that businesses have a social media policy.
To recap, the main threats to an employer from misuse of social media are;
