Next month sees the new Equality Act come into force, as I mentioned last week in #1. EA10 will do away with existing discrimination law, including the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005. There will be several changes to disability discrimination. What should employers be doing in response to avoid workplace discrimination claims?
There have been some interesting reported cases over the last couple of weeks on a broad range of topics. For instance,
Legal Representation at Internal Disciplinary Hearings
As an employer, if you want to avoid your name appearing in the Metro or any of the other free papers, try to avoid sacking employees suffering from cancer by email. This is the moral from the recent report concerning Melinda Bolnar, a 27 year old teacher suffering from bowel cancer and who had just endured seven months of chemotherapy and given a 30% chance of survival. According to the report it is alleged that her private school sacked her by email. I should point out that the case is due to be heard at an Employment Tribunal later this year and the above report are merely the employee’s allegations against her employer and not the proven facts.
I was pleased to learn that Riam Dean, the law student who sued Abercrombie & Fitch for wrongful dismissal and unlawful harassment (because of her disability) won her case at the London Central Employment Tribunal. According to The Independent today, she was awarded £7,800 compensation for injury to feelings, £1,077.37 for loss of earnings and £136.75 damages for being wrongfully dismissed. It is reported that she did not succeed with her claim for “direct” disability discrimination which the ET thought was “not well founded”. I would be interested to read the law report on this case, if it ever gets published, for the reasoning behind the decision. I’ve posted before on the case (click here).
Riam Dean’s case against the American clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch caught my eye this week. Last summer she had a holiday job working as a shop assistant at the Savile Row branch of A&F. She alleges she was told to leave the shopfloor and work in the stockroom, for not complying with the company’s strict “look” policy. Her crime? She was wearing a white cardigan. Apparently (and this was all news to me) A&F have a very strict policy on the appearance of their staff which doesn’t include white cardigans it would seem. This however, wasn’t a claim under the Employment Equality (Prevention of Discrimination to Cardigan Wearers) Regulations, which have yet to be promulgated. It was instead a claim under the Disability Discrimination Act because Riam wore the cardigan to disguise her prosthetic lower left arm. She was self-conscious about the join between her arm and the prosthetic at the elbow. She says she had previously been given special permission to wear the cardigan. The case is ongoing at the moment, the ET hasn’t decided whether to accept her allegations or not and it will be interesting to see the result. However, if her allegations are upheld it will be a shameful episode for A&F.
The House of Lords (HL) has finally handed down judgment in the case of Stringer v HMRC. To say this decision has been keenly anticipated is an understatement. I posted on it a little while ago.