The Weirdest Employment Cases!
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007Is the law an ass? If so, what does that make lawyers? The reason that I ask is because the Employment Appeal Tribunal has just celebrated its 30th birthday and to mark the occasion Times Online trawled the archives and dusted off some of the more colourful UK employment disputes from the past few years! The research [credited to Henry Scrope at emplaw.co.uk and Richard Lister and James Davies at Lewis Silkin] makes for fun (or sad?) reading! The top 5 (in reverse order) are:5. The Foamy sales pitch. Wayne Simpson, an EDF Energy salesman, lost his £28,000-a-year job after he sent a customer a picture of himself sitting naked drinking whisky in a bubble bath. Simpson had met the female customer while selling door-to-door on Tyneside; he obtained her number and later sent the picture with a message saying, “Fancy going out for a drink sometime?” The woman didn’t and instead reported him to the company and the police. Simpson accused EDF of lacking a sense of humour. “I wasn’t even showing off my naughty bits,” he said.
4. The farting chair. Sue Storer, a 48-year-old teacher at Bedminster Down Secondary School in Bristol, sougth damages of £1 million for sex discrimination and constructive dismissal claiming she had been forced to sit in a chair that made embarrassing sounds every time she moved. “It was a regular joke that my chair would make these farting sounds and I regularly had to apologise that it wasn’t me, it was my chair,” she said. Requests for a new chair had been repeatedly ignored while male colleagues were given sleek, executive-style chairs, she said. Her claim was thrown out.
3. Look out for the flour. Caroline Gardener, a lesbian shop worker at a Booker Cash and Carry, won her claim for unfair dismissal after she was fired following an altercation with a customer. Gardner, of Eastleigh, Hampshire, claimed a customer abused her because he couldn’t find any lime cordial, telling her to “Get your sex life sorted out.” She responded by throwing a bag of flour at him. “When he called me a filthy dyke I had a pack of flour in my hand and, although I regret it now, I threw it at the back of his head,” she admitted. “He then turned round and said, ‘You are a dyke and you’re going to get the sack’.” Gardner lost other claims for breach of contract and discrimination on the grounds of her sexual orientation.
2. Legal tender? Fred Raine was awarded £2,300 after an industrial tribunal agreed that his former employer, Lee’s Coaches, in Langley Moor, had underpaid him when he left the company due to illness in 2005. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, but the same can’t be said for his former boss Malcolm Lee’s chosen method of payment. The first £1,000 of Raine’s severance pay was paid by cheque, but the remaining £1,300 turned up at his door in the form of a crate full of coins weighing 11 stone. Raine described the gesture as “unacceptable” and said he was consulting his lawyer.
1. An axe to grind. James Robertson, a convicted murderer who had served his time and was working as a health inspector for Preston City Council, found himself back behind bars after threatening a colleague with an axe during an argument at an Indian restaurant in 2001. The council (not unreasonably, you might feel) terminated his employment without notice, but Robertson sued for breach of contract. The employment tribunal ruled that the Council had acted illegally in not giving Robertson sufficient notice and ordered it to pay him two weeks’ wages as compensation, amounting to £807.50.
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