REWARD INSIGHT
Main terms, ill-health pension, Army reservist
NicolaMullineux, senior employment specialist for Peninsula, reviews the decisions in three cases
Stefanko and others v Maritime Hotel Ltd In this case the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) was tasked with deciding if an employee, who was never provided with a written statement of main terms, was entitled to compensation despite being employed for less than two months. The employee in question was one of three Polish nationals who were hired as hotel waiting staff at the Maritime Hotel on separate dates from 21 April 2016. All three employees were dismissed on 7 July 2016, shortly after their employment began, having objected to ‘persistent shortfalls in their wages, late payment and a falsification of their wage slips’. The employees originally brought joint claims to an employment tribunal (ET) for race discrimination, based on their Polish nationality, as well as for automatic unfair dismissal, having asserted their statutory right to receive a written statement of main terms. Having reviewed the evidence, the ET dismissed their claim for race discrimination, finding that the employer would have treated non- Polish comparators in the same manner.
of two months. The third employee, the ET said, did not qualify for compensation as she had only worked for six weeks at the time of her dismissal, and section 38 of the Employment Act 2002 states employers must have two months’ service from the date of employment to provide this statement. ...day-one right to receive a written statement of main terms as of 6 April 2020 The employee in question appealed this decision to the EAT which upheld the appeal. The EAT outlined that the initial ET had overlooked section 2(6) of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which states that the right to a written statement of main terms exists if an individual has been employed for longer than one month and their employment expires before the two months has passed. This meant that all three employees were owed four weeks’ compensation for a failure to be provided with a written statement of main terms. This decision highlights that a failure to provide employees with a written statement of main terms can leave organisations open to costly tribunal
claims. Even those who are dismissed, or are employed on short-term contracts, are entitled to receive these terms so long as they have obtained one month’s service. Ensuring that written statements of main terms are provided in a timely manner minimises the risk of ambiguity or misunderstanding of the terms that form the contractual basis of the employment relationship. Therefore, employers should consider issuing these to employees as soon as possible once they have agreed to join the organisation and could choose to do so as part of any induction process. It is also worth noting that the government’s Good Work plan, announced on 18 December 2018, outlines that all workers, including agency staff and those on zero-hour contracts, will have a day-one right to receive a written statement of main terms as of 6 April 2020. In anticipation of this, employers may be inclined to voluntarily implement this practice ahead of time to reduce the risk of errors in future. The UK’s Supreme Court has agreed with earlier decisions of both the Court of Appeal (CoA) and the EAT that an ill- health retirement pension scheme did not amount to disability discrimination, despite it being potentially more advantageous to other employees. Williams v Trustees of Swansea University
Meanwhile, all three employees successfully won their claims for
automatic unfair dismissal. Despite this, the ET decided only two of the claimants qualified for compensation of four weeks’ pay, as they had worked for a minimum
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | April 2019 | Issue 49 34
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