Employment Practice

Key points As the High Court remarked in  Lawton v BOC Transhield Ltd  [1987] IRLR 404, an employer is under no legal obligation to give a former employee a reference. But, if he (or she) does do so, he owes a duty to that employee to take reasonable care to ensure that the opinions he expresses in it are based on accurate facts and, in so far as the reference itself states facts, that those facts are themselves accurate. When an employer approaches another employer for information and opinions about one of the latter's employees (past or present), it should be self-evident, said the court, that the employee in question has proffered his (or her) former employer's name as referee, that he is being seriously considered for employment elsewhere, that he is relying on the former employer to get his facts right, and that an adverse report would almost certainly result in his being taken off the short list or remaining unemployed for an unspecified period. In other words, t...

Key points The Redundancy Payments Act 1965 (whose provisions have long since been repealed and largely re-enacted in the Employment Rights Act 1996) came into force on 6 December 1965. The two principal objectives of the Act were to require employers to compensate redundant employees for the loss of their livelihoods and to establish a Redundancy Fund from which employers would recoup a percentage (or rebate) of any statutory redundancy payment due and paid to a redundant employee. However, the already (by then) much-mutilated redundancy rebates scheme was abolished when the Employment Act 1989 came into force on 16 January 1990. It should be noted that the purpose of the redundancy payments scheme is to compensate a redundant employee for the loss of his (or her) investment in his job – not, as might be supposed, to provide him with sufficient funds to help him survive a period of unemployment. Accordingly, any employee who has lost his job because of redundancy may legit...

Key points Under the provisions of the Race Relations Act 1976, it is unlawful for any person in Great Britain to discriminate against another person on grounds of colour, race, nationality or national or ethnic origins – whether in the field of employment or in the provision of goods, facilities or services. The 1976 Act, which repealed and replaced earlier Race Relations Acts, identifies three forms of racial discrimination, each of which is unlawful. These are: direct discrimination  (which occurs when a person is treated less favourably than other persons because of his or her colour, race, nationality, etc); indirect discrimination  (which occurs when a person is effectively denied access to employment opportunities, goods, facilities, services, etc by the imposition of an unjustifiable condition or requirement which places him or her at a disadvantage relative to persons of a different racial group); and discrimination in the form of  victimisat...