BHS workers share £1m payout over failed redundancy process 24 April 2017
Employment tribunal awards 110 head office workers up to 90 days’ wages for ‘complete failure to consult’ staff before dismissal.
The Guardian has reported that a group of former BHS workers have altogether won up to £1m in compensation over the summary way they were made redundant when the retailer collapsed.
A London employment tribunal awarded 110 employees at the firm’s head office up to 90 days’ wages after their lawyers successfully argued that the company did not conduct a proper consultation process with them ahead of their dismissal.
The employees were represented by the law firm JWK, which successfully argued that BHS failed to fulfil its legal duty to consult with staff for at least 45 days before making them redundant when the retailer collapsed last April.
The tribunal ruled there had been “a complete failure to consult” and that the claimants should receive the maximum protective award.
JWK brought the claim against BHS and the government on behalf of former staff. The business department therefore will have to hand the staff the equivalent of 40 days’ pay, and the defunct company’s estate will be liable for the remaining 50 days’ money. Payments will vary in size depending on salaries but the government’s contribution is capped at £3,800 per person When BHS collapsed into administration a year ago , with the loss of 11,000 job losses, it was the biggest high-street failure since that of Woolworths, which went into administration in 2008. The retailer had been owned by Sir Philip Green for 15 years until he sold it to Dominic Chappell, a former bankrupt, for just £1 in March 2015.
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Working Time - sleeping at work 3 May 2017
Are workers entitled to the national minimum wage when 'on-call', or sleeping, at work?
In a comprehensive decision, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decides 'it depends'.
In three cases heard at the same time (with the lead case being Focus Care Agency v Roberts ), Simler P. considered whether three tribunals had correctly decided whether 'sleep-in' time counted as 'time work' for the purpose of the National Minimum Wage Regulations. Although conscious of the importance of this issue for employers and employees (in no small part because of the risk of criminal sanctions if the employer gets it wrong), the EAT was unable to give a straight 'yes' or 'no' answer. Indeed, it disapproved of the approach sometimes adopted of cases where a worker is working merely by being at the premises, and cases where the worker is provided with accommodation and is simply on-call. Rather, it held, a multi-factorial approach is required - giving considerable weight to the facts of any individual case and thus considerable leeway to an individual employment tribunal to decide. The four factors are set out at paragraph 44 of the judgment (they are too long to reproduce in this brief summary).
If you advise employers (or are an employer) which engages workers who sleep at night, read paragraph 44. The remainder of the decision shows how the principles can be applied to different factual situations.
With thanks to Daniel Barnett’s employment law bulletin for providing this update.
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