PREVIOUS SPEAKERS:
Richard Ascough,
Senior Organiser/Legal Officer, GMB union
Peter Schofield,
Director of Employment and Legal Affairs, EEF
ILS, Annual Oxford Conference, 1o-12 September 2003
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to list of speakers Title: "Workshop: New Dispute Resolution procedures – a dog’s dinner?"
Are the new statutory minimum dispute resolution procedures a ‘dog’s dinner’? Will they achieve their object? What benefits and disadvantages do unions and employers see coming from the new rules?
As well as outlining the new rules, we hope in this workshop to address these questions as well as raising questions about the interpretation of the legislation and its application in practice.
If time permits, we shall consider issues arising from the following:
- C believes her manager, R, has frequently been unfairly critical of her work. She is particularly upset that he criticises her work in front of colleagues. She believes that he has adopted this attitude to her because she refused his repeated invitations to go for a drink with him when she first joined his department. When she is late for work one morning, R calls her to his office and gives her what he calls a first and final warning for her unsatisfactory attitude to her work. C is so upset at this that she leaves the office immediately after collecting her belongings and writing a letter to R saying that she is resigning with immediate effect because of his despicable behaviour towards her and that ‘today was the last straw’.
- D was engaged by an employment agency to work for W. She has continued to work at W for some time but throughout has been paid by the agency. After an incident in which D was allegedly rude to a customer of W, her engagement was terminated by the agency at the request of W. D brings a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal and racial discrimination against both W and the agency. Her claim refers to a campaign of racial discrimination against her during her time at W. D has not, at the time of presentation of her complaint, raised a grievance under any procedure, whether W’s or the agency’s. Consider the application of the dispute resolution procedures assuming (a) you act for D; (b) you act for W.
After talking to a friend, C decides she is going to bring a tribunal claim for constructive dismissal and sexual harassment against her former employers.
C presents her claim to the tribunal and states on it that she sent her employer a statement of her grievance on the day she resigned.
Power Point presentation (490 kb)