Strange employment law rulings

[Viking Warrior]

Do some CPD today and I was reading up on an interesting case as follows

 

Ms Roberts was 18 when dismissed by her employer following her continued failure to grasp and/or follow certain important internal procedures at Cash Zone. As part of its efforts to drum those procedures into her, CZ management met with her from time to time and left written notes/instructions in relation to things which had gone wrong the previous week. It was admitted that in those meetings and notes about her poor performance, Ms Roberts had been described as a “kid”, a “stroppy kid”, and “a stroppy little teenager”. Notwithstanding the Tribunal’s ultimate acceptance that she was indeed (a) stroppy; (b) little; and © a teenager, Ms Roberts alleged this to be harassment on grounds of her age.

 

The employment Tribunal found in favour of the teenager re the harassment claim and awarded her £2k for injury to hurt feelings

The Tribunal noted by way of explanation that the remarks were not a casual one-off conversation with a colleague in the workplace, but a continuing series of deliberately critical comments made by managers in the execution of managerial responsibilities relating to Ms Roberts’ performance.

 

So if your an employer be careful what you say to any of your darling employees even if they are little or big ****s

[saint1977]

Let's look at the facts here though Viking, the company were very foolish in letting their supervisors use that sort of language. That's nothing to do with ETs or the current laws and if you believed all the ideological guff put out, this is commonplace and we need our employment framework written by a loan shark (Beecroft & Wonga) based on anecdotal evidence. It's actually rare. The young person hasn't done herself any favour going to an ET, £2k versus being tarnished as a 'troublemaker' by most companies isn't worth the hassle, especially at that age. Now, she'd have to pay a deposit before going to an ET anyway.

 

With a professional approach to managing this and good commercial procedures, this should have been a straightforward performance management case. Why wasn't she given a mentor for example? That costs nothing. If she hadn't improved, a fair dismissal could have been made quite quickly with little realistic prospect of being challenged. Another question I'd be asking in your CPD log is why did the company not look at the language of supervisors and provide appropriate re-training?