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DIY
Employment Law for sacked employees
#2. check ideas by phone:
employment law help lines include ACAS 08457 47
47 47 Mo-Fr 8-6
They prefer callers to try their automated
question page first at the bottom of the linked page.
#5. add your name if you are
interested in joining a proper union
because
some of the current big ones are a scam. This idea has not caught-on
over the few years this site has been online, so with luck someone
else will find a way to do it better. /startyourownunion.html
is a popular page.
The idea is to learn the minimum possible law in the shortest
possible time to sue in the 3-month time limit, recovering your
nerves a little & seeking or doing other work. This is an
unusual thing for any court to ask, but in employment law, it's
thought that justice is increased by hearing less cases. Anyone
after 3 months who could physically have got to a court letterbox
earlier is barred, despite the letter of the law which says "reasonable".
So the damage done to individuals
can be as great as in criminal offences, but the system is different.
- Nobody asks a crime victim to value the time lost,
so that victims who are old or ill get less.
- Nobody asks a crime victim to do their own police
work, provide a file of evidence and organise a prosecution while
recovering & trying get on with their lives. The
police are not like a paid-for service, but they are free at
the piont of use. It's possible to think "I've called the
police and helped them when asked: I've done all I can".
- Nobody sets-up a union system to help crime victims,
and then uses lawyers who avoid contact & refuse to take
the file of evidence. These are lawyers who's only purpose
is to suck-up to the other side, claim a minimal amount for neusance
plus legal fees and then pay commission out of that to the union.
If the crown prosecution service did that for crime victims,
it would be controversial. If union lawyers do that for the same
people at work, it's all too much trouble for anyone to report.
- Most people expect the future behaviour of criminals
to be important.
Compensation for victims isn't an important point; a guilty or
not guilty verdict is the point of a trial. Probation or time
off for good behaviour in prison are accepted, particularly for
prisoners who show remorse, while the catching of a repeat criminal
is a point of pride. In employment law, both sides are allowed
to settle and there is a risk of costs being found against a
complainant if they don't, so an employer that has trouble staying
out of court is allowed to practice over and over so they can
bully better next time, while the person they asked to do wrong
can get a job at another bank or social
work agency or whatever. No wonder large employers don't
work. One of the bosses in my management chain was a kind of
Gorden Ramsey character. Eventually she left, and took-up a job
well-away from London where she wasn't known. For some reason
her new emloyer - New Highway - collapsed. She was last heard
of at TurningPoint. Maybe that will collapse too.
- A lot of criminals have an idea that they have done
wrong & been caught
No such concept exists among employers claim government grants
to ask employees to do the impossible and then plot against them
instead of helping. No such concept exists among union officials
that rip-off members. The nearest is some sense of reality that
dawns on employers when they get a tribunal form in the post,
but it's not like being arrested and it doesn't seem to effect
their careers; it's more like discovering that they have dry
rot in the loft or forgot to pay their gas bill. As for trades
union people, they seem to live in a separate world outside of
economic legal processes or fair media criticism. The only criticism
they get is criticism for being troublemakers, which helps recruitment.
Criticism from members simply goes in the bin.
- Henchpeople remain loyal
Criminals are taken to police stations. With luck they state
that they were the catburglers or muggers or faudsters or theives
of the operation and that the cat mug fraud & thieving planner
was the big fish of the operation. They hope for time off their
sentence. In employment law, the opposite is true. A cat, mug,
fraud, or theif worker hopes to stay in post or maybe get a reference
from the big fish if they pretend that all mistakes were theirs;
Mr Machiavelli the director had nothing to do with a system of
bullying that might have existed in the organisation. That's
the story. Whatever the hopes for rewarded loyalty, it's hard
to get rid of a loony middle manager if everyone is too frightened
to give evidence so the directors and middle managers might be
stuck in business together for a while.
- Employment law is a recent addition to civil law
with its own tribunal system.
People aren't use to spotting repeat offenders.
A contractor who tried to do building work or car repairs would
have trouble getting new customers after showing-up on the London
Gazette for bankrupcy or register of county court judgements,
with a case-against awarded to a disgruntled customer. They would
have trouble getting customers if they just sat in meetings and
plotted all day. But no such tradition exists with employment
law: an employer can have trouble keeping out of court and still
get repeat public sector funding while the individuals who did
bad things can persue their careers wreaking havoc wherever they
go, sitting in meetings and plotting against their colleagues
instead of providing a service to the public. Employment appeals
used to be about traditional employers in trades like dredging
or fish filleting that had not caught-up with the times. Now
they are about taxpayer-funded organisations and their employees
with their mutual pots. Are these employers an easy target? Possibly.
Do they do work which is hard to define? Often. Are they silted-up
with bad quality procedures and documents which don't chose the
right staff? Yes. But another problem is that they can move grant
money under the counter to pay another tribunal case. Other mad
employers find that their insurance premiums rise if they take-out
legal insurance. Contractors to government can simply divert
our money and forge their returns to say that it went on some
public service as intended, like hepling victems of crime.
Employment appeal cases, which are published, tend to list
several points which "have no reasonable prospect of
success" and then make a big deal of some point of
principal. "No reasonable prospect" might
mean the judge didn't understand while trying to read them on
train. Maybe a fat person with loads of shopping squeezed onto
the same double seat. This will be a judge used to self-employment
and not sure about the complex bullying techniques of a mad employer.
The same process applies in ordinary cases, with a "pre
hearing review" now allowing judges to exclude a lot
of the case while sitting alone or with any lawyers who turn-up,
and the judges are pressured with performance targets to do just
that. If a trade union lawyer who is no-win no-fee and pays commission
to the union is involved, they might even refuse to take any
evidence from the client and not tell the tribunal chair that
it exists.
Out of all the complainants with injury to feelings, some
get their claims thrown out by someone who hasn't understood
the case, some get thrown-out because the case law on things
like time limits is injust, and some who may be least deserving
get a huge excess of damages because the employer cannot prove
they had a written procedure in place on the day of the event.
Obviously they didn't because they were doing a useful job unlike
the tribunal service which is taxpayer funded but hey. So everybody
is unhappy and everybody pays but the in-built snobbery of the
system and how it is reported keeps it going without a murmur
of complaint. The fault is ours that we do not put it right,
although as someone who has tried to contact an MP I have to
say that debate is difficult.
Those employers who are not focussed on anything in particular
- in social services, housing associations, colleges, the arts
- are able to spend time & cash plotting against their employees
who are at the tops of pay scales, rivals for promotion or taking
maternity leave rather than directing their employees. They like
to be called "Chief Executive" rather than director
and delegate the dirty to henchmen with titles like "Head
of doing things". Maybe public funded directors bully anyone
who comes to their attention: people who are too black when a
ward or service of an NHS trust wants to look more straight-laced,
or too white when a council department or voluntary organisation
is basically black; too popular and so offensive to a disliked
director, or too unpopular and so an easy target. Senior staff
would argue that some of the junior ones are chancers too, surviving
on the back of a badly-written contract that doesn't say that
they have to do anything to get paid, earbash in meetings and
leave their work to the rest. This logic leads to tolerance of
bullying as a way of getting rid of the worst - sometimes the
ones who get in the way because they are doing a lot of the work
without any help from the top. Junior staff would argue that
they are in fact brain surgeons and rocket scientists doing a
good job with no help and a Machiavelli for boss who can't even
sort out a fair job contract. To see what public-funded employees
really get from the top see http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html.
So just
about everyone and particularly politicians fail the employee
who has deliberately been driven to a nervous breakdown for fun.
This one-page guide is in the style of the MoneysavingExpert.com/Reclaim's
guides to getting consumer revenge, in the hope that someone
can make the system work.
No-win no-fee employment lawyers make very little money to
pay for tidying-up a case, so the more homework you can do the
better even if you can persuade a no-win no-fee employment law
solicitor to sit-in with you or put your case. Unions and their
no-win no-fee employment law solicitors can be worse than useless
- for example in the case on the Unison-lawyers.html
page, and chasing them can take time away from what you want
to do. Unison and Unite-T&G have admitted to using
no-win no-fee lawyers for personal injury cases and T&G has
been caught going further, and charging the lawyers for the privelage
of getting a claim. An Amicus
campaign document estimates that all TUC unions do it. People
who have read this site and done their best to prepare a case
against a bullying employer have still been turned-down by every
no-win no-fee lawyer they can find, so there is still a need
for informal union-rep work and formal legal insurance. The rest
of this site is an informed rant about union failures and if
you want to start your own union
please sign-up or set-up your own site along these lines.
- If there's nothing to suggest any kind of disaster looming,
but you are cautious, get legal insurance from a broker. It tends
not to be available online except with home contents insurance;
but brokers can get it
separately for ten or twenty pounds a year. As with union
membership, companies probably sell an introduction to a chain
of no-win-no-fee lawyers as though it were insurance, and as
though this should be legal, which it is and shouldn't be. The
company may pay no insurance premium tax on your subscription.
You can probably find
out. DAS legal insureres claimed that their "only
source of income" was bribes from lawyers who want
the more lucrative personal injury claims and are willing to
fob-off the more common and loss-making employment claimants
as a kind of cross subsidy. But legal insureres are at least
half sane about providing legal services and have some sense
of shame if caught out while if you have a union membership,
which could be a good thing to do, there is probably only an
implied contract rather than a written one. Any written contract
or implied service from leaflets is unlikely to be as good as
documents from firms that register with the financial services
authority. So trade union's opportunities for exploiting sacked
members are greater. Also the underdog volunteer tradition of
trades unions is not a written, contractual tradition and allows
a far great degree of bullshit than the dodgiest legal insurer
would dare to say or write on a lavatory wall. A feature of union
statements in employment appeal tribunals here and there against
their members is that they do not seem to know that what they
are doing is wong, very much like the public-funded employers
that members are typically up against.
- If you don't have legal insurance, there are still things
that can be done of which changing jobs is sadly often the best
followed by DIY employment law. If you do use a no-win no-fee
lawyer, or a your trade union uses
no-win no-fee lawyers without telling you, the more DIY work
you can do for them the better. Some people put their own tribunal
cases and unpaid union reps can do useful things in a crisis
too, dispite union-failure.htm
page.
- Keep a work-diary of events and a home journal of thoughts;
try to keep vital papers like a job contract, staff handbook,
supervision minutes and unreasonable memos at home. If this seems
far fetched, that's why you should do it: some people don't.
Memos may be designed to needle
& provoke you by deliberate misunderstanding. Even Gerry
Robinson got one in his "Can Gerry Robinson sort out
the NHS?" programme. The BBC report showed him agreeing
that the top of the hierarchy should bash down and tighten up
the bottom, but the detail of the programme showed the Chief
Executive of Rotherham hospital attempting a botched unfair dismissal
on Gerry Robinson who wasn't even an employee. It must
have been a well-practiced habit to be tried on television in
such a botched way. "I find this nit-picking increadably
frustrating", said the presenter. "That was
the intention", says the courtier. Later:
"you can't sack anyone except in a rather Machiavellian
way". The courtier does not disagree. Later in the
programme a middle-aged anaesthetist with a pretty secure-looking
job is asked about management. "I may be shortening
my career by saying this..." he begins. The government
courtier who authorises sackings writes "remember: I
have to manage upwards and sideways as well as downwards"in
a web-discussion later, to explain why he does his real job so
little that people don't even know his face round the hospital:
courtiership is the priority. People in the private sector might
ask why they pay taxes to a courtier who does not visit the operating
theatres, believes in the "rather Machiavellian way"
and doesn't criticise stupid government re-organsiations that
take-up all of his time like moving half the business of casualty
up the road to call it "community".The reason
why these are the best people we can vote-in are elusive, and
the frustration of thinking about the big-picture and your own
career all at once just add to the burden of an unfair dismissal.
Taking stuff
home may be last thing you want to do. If it comes by email,
copy it to yourself on a private account. If you want a record
of an email sent to your boss, send it from a private account
even if at work (she will still deny getting it, but it's better
than loosing all email evidence if the worst happens). And: about
needling. I found it impossible never to say something that could
be quoted-back to make me look unreasonable. And I was trying
from the start to consider anything I said to be potential evidence
against me, because I knew I was returning to work after an illness
and I knew what bastards employers can be. Maybe you can do better.
Imagine you are writing to the employment tribunal with a copy
to your employer. Likewise, I have found that every employer
that tries to bully tends to keep defiant employees. If you are
an employer trying to get rid of staff you don't want, please
don't bully: it only encourages them to read sites like this
and hang-on to the job instead of leaving. Maybe pay them to
leave or find some legal way to make them redundant, perhaps
including them in the process of working out how you do it.
If you have given-up the job,
keep a record of attempts to find work as the law wrongly assumes
you are getting compensation for your lost earnings rather than
trying to get a criminal nailed.[1]
- Talk to someone for clarity.
Try to find
someone who will help you collect your thoughts and your files
as you find out about the law.
Clarity is the
hardest part, because a case is likely to come of long-felt grievances
and then intense stress, after which it is difficult to fit familiar
things to an outsider's perspective.
One book,
Bully in sight by Tim Field ISBN 0952912104, relates
the stress involved to post traumatic stress diagnosis. It
is easy to under-estimate the effect on mental health of an unfair
dismissal after months or years of trying to resist it. If this
applies in part to you, others around you will have noticed it
and be bored or scared by it. To say "I need your help
in being clear because this is quite stressful", is
better than implying "I find this quite stressful so
I need you to act lawyer in this thing I'm always going-on about".
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20444718373&ref=ts
links to a petition to allow ombudsmen to investigate public
sector bullying - sadly not mentioning the public-funded voluntary
sector. It isn't a discussion group but has some interesting
links.
Sirpeterscott.com is
a web site about an employment and stress case from the employees
perspective. Imagine you're a lawyer and give yourself exactly
two minutes to see where a lawyer can fit-in. Or the
rambling back-pages of this site, Employees.org.uk. Complexity
is a problem for employees, as public sector managers for example
have nothing much to do except plot against their subordinates,
each other and their funders. They do not want to know what real
people do in case they can be blamed; they prefer to keep a distance
and live in a parallel universe, bigging-up the difficulties
of hiring and firing, reading the bank statement or calling a
plumber while ignoring the difficult jobs like teaching in a
university, being a brain surgeon, or a rocket scientist. In
any of these cases it's likely that managers have deliberately
set-up employees to fail by pinching notes about a tricky lecture,
brain, or rocket in the hope that a rival or an awkward subordinate
will make a mistake and can then be sacked. Likewise they have
probably overworked their subordinates in order to keep more
money at the top, or at least to keep more blame at the bottom
of the heirachy. Re-reading that sentence it seems bizarre but
true. Maybe a rocket really has been saboutaged by a senior manager
who wants to show-up the faults of a junior one, a brain operation
saboutaged in order to end the career of the surgeon, and certainly
an opera by a university music department has been described
like this on the Sirperterscott.com web site.
In partial ignorance, distance, and in suspician
of what their staff do it is easy for machiavellis to ignore
a build-up of problems over years and to interpret real attempts
to make the best of them as trouble-making. When things go wrong
and funders, trustees or rivals for power demand action, then
the old explanation that it's the junior staff's fault but you
have to make allowances is tested: directors are instructed to
pull the levers of power harder and unfair dismissals result.
In organisations where there
is only one management line (plus the fraudulent union) blame
will tend to be passed to the bottom of the management line while
credit will be passed to the top. There is no second opinion
who a stressed director can consult before risking a sacking.
Outsiders like broadcasters
tend to assume that the employer has made the work and that the
dispute is about some unfairness or discrimination that leads
to an overly sudden end. Those at the top of the hierachy are
assumed to be interested in their organisations's work with patients,
pupils, rockets and the like except for a few bad-apples who
can quickly be found out by a few questions from the tribunal.
It is not thought that Machiavellis run large organisations where
subordinates good or bad work is not measured and manager's plots
are deliberately concealed over long periods.
So the assumption is that an employer has made
the work, sackings are a fact of life, and that a few bad apples
among employers can quickly be found out within perfomance targets
set to the tribunal service by the government, for example by
weeding-out weak claims at pre-hearing reviews where one Chair
sits alone and decides on a whim what is stong evidence even
if he has not read the evidence. Tribunals are different from
criminal courts. Outcomes are in payments of money rather than
declarations of guilt and take account of the complainant's efforts
to get another job. Conduct like pressuring witnesses not to
appear, paying the other side to withdraw the case, or asking
the other side for costs if they loose are discouraged or encouraged
and certainly taken as facts of life in tribunal cases where
a criminal court would see them as obviously bad and wicked and
things to be banged-up for. Yob things.
If someone is unpleasant and unfair, but creates
a job which someone fills for a time, then employment law makes
some sense of the departure. This is where it starts from. But
even here it is too complex. The reason it is complex is that
over the years, practitioners have recognised other situations
where the consequences are at least as important as in criminal
law: the person driven to a nervous breakdown by discrimination
at the only employer in town, for example, is rightly allowed
much higher levels of compensation if they win. High payouts
are also possible in cases that start as procedural failings:
an employer has such badly written long set of procedures (or
none at all) that nobody could prove that procedure was followed,
and jumping briefly to health and safety law there is the issue
of whether a risk assessment was carried-out. It may be a tick
in a box but if it was not carried out in a provable way that
is guilt, even to judges who like the rest of us do not record
risk assessments of their decisions at home.
A kind of snakes-and-ladders game of special cases
has emerged. Can't argue your case very clearly? Snake. Spotted
a procedural flaw in an otherwise fair sacking? Ladder. Discrimination?
Ladder. Union lawyer tries to muck up your case? Snake.
In the game of snakes and ladders,
some people have much more time to play than others. On the employees'
side the lazy sod who goes off-sick on day one of the job and
hopes for some procedural flaw in the sacking has plenty of time.
When I was off sick for stress from a job, I asked someone I
knew at an agency for less stressful work. She gave me two day's
work compiling the time sheets of a social worker off-sick from
Harringay who was photographed doing social work jobs at another
London borough. This social worker had plenty of time to play
with employment law because the taxpayer and vulnerable child
were not on her list of priorities.
On the employer's side public-funded managers seem
to appear in tribunal cases more than most according to the appeals
judgements which are free and online.
 Big
organisation managers are Machiavellis & the problem is greater
in the pubic funded sector than the private funded sector. Machiavellis
play full time, like hardened criminals committing crimes &
with similar consequences for their victims. They
can spin jargon where subordinates have to do a proper job
- sometimes a responsible one with no help from them, paid-for
used by all of us. The idea pops into their heads that they could
hinder the job (or ask a handpicked henchmen to do it by rudeness
threat & hint) so that maybe 99 people get the wrong leg
cut off in hospital, number 100 complains & the complaint
gets rid of the troublemaker surgeon. Maybe not the bad or lazy
surgeon, but the one who has come to the Machiavelli's attention.
This has all been documented on video for the open university.
When they are so used to it that
they leave cocky clues, the clues need time & care to interpret
in context - criminals' clues or managers' clues are the same.
The tribunal system was never set-up with a police force &
juries and a Crown Prosecution Service to handle this. It is
more like a magistrates court. The targets set for them (read
out in Parliament by Pat
McFaddon, a T&G sponsored MP elected on low turnout in
Wolverhampton) take even less account of the complexity of a
case where an employer deliberately tries to conceal motives
& works for months or years with the idea of confusing a
tribunal in mind. (Oh he was the MP who gave two union modernisation
grants to the T&G.)
MoneySupermarket.com's employment law lawyer finder
service asks you to state your case in a three inch square box;
TakeLegalAdvice.com gives half a page and the employment tribunal
form allows a few hundred words. The legal system is more like
a small claims court than a criminal court, geared to assessing
simple known facts so that the two sides can settle for small
amounts of money.
Newly
self-taught law is hard to get to grips with too, when you recover
the ability to research it and find that others are intimidated
by your efforts. I went to a CAB and saw a volunteer who said
things like "is that really the law?" while
looking at the CAB website and my notes, but attempting to explain
myself to another person was a help. People who you live with
may be too closely bound-up in your own stress and the history
of your case ever to rehearse it with you or ask you what happened.
Some people you know may not be legally-minded - they may think
more about relationships between people - but others might think
legally and be willing to help you rehearse. Often as you become
marked as a trouble maker or are suspended from work, colleagues
will be instructed not to contact you as well.
Just say you want peoples' help
in being clear, not their legal help in double-checking all your
frightening research.
- Write a long draft and expect to cut more than half for the
final shorter draft.
It is
perfectly sane and sensible to try and put-in every new-found
law and every angle of grief into a first draft of complaint
to an employment tribunal, in order not to miss anything. Anyway,
the sheer stain of trying to hold every defence in your head
is enough to make you want to write it down somewhere, whether
a journal or a long draft, and stress or such may have had an
effect on short term memory. When waking up at three in the morning
thinking about work, it could be good to write down the other
side's concealed logical links that have just come to mind. "He
did that because of X Y and Z, not W." It's good to do emotionally
and good to try to nail a serial-bad-person who has a lot of
experience of wrongdoing and avoidance of responsibility for
it. Some people write their final complaint by hand and are even
more notorious amongst lawyers, but maybe you or someone you
know can edit the realisations and jottings to something that
an unsympathetic person thinks is a summery.
- My guess is that DIY cases are best put as DIY cases by you
to the chair, with a last-minute lawyer sitting-in to advise
if available. You can explain why you put everything in. To let
a last-minute lawyer put a case could be the worst of both worlds.
To a tribunal chair, you are represented: the importance of
"Dealing
with a case justly includes, so far as practicable: - [...] ensuring
that the parties are on an equal footing"
does not so clearly apply. The next point on his
job description of pressure to act fast still applies and this
one is quantifiable and enforced by bosses according to targets
read-out in Parliament by a Transport and General Workers' Union
MP. Also, a lawyer's habit of always dealing with representatives
where possible, and a spoken or unspoken pressure not to point
out the faults of trades unions all work in the employer's favour:
"They haven't got time
to think about all that", one lawyer from Which
Legal Service told me;
"They just
notice whether you are represented or not".
The fact you have had to study law while you should
have been recovering from the stress caused by the other side
may not be stated, while the other side's insurance company's
lawyers will be keen to show-up your weaknesses, and make you
look like a mad nuisance chancer running up costs in order to
ask for a settlement. The impact of employer's action on you
seems to be subject to a fluid and obscure area of law.
You can see the process in reverse
in the Unison v Jervis case
where the union's expensive barrister pretends she doesn't know
why the case is so late and why there are so many papers that
are more than three months old. Any tribunal chair should know
why. It is because the union failed to help their member and
he had to teach himself law while stressed-out and centre-stage.
But tribunal chairs are under pressure to deal with cases quickly
and I think under political pressure not to embarrass trades
unions who fund the party that gives them their jobs. I got the
same tribunal chair who's judgment was overturned in on appeal
for Unison a few months earlier. It was another case of a union
doing so badly for a member that he should have told me what
had gone-on in part of the pre-hearing review that the union
lawyer has asked me not to attend. When I discovered that the
whole case had been messed-up without any evidence being shown
(the lawyer had refused to take any from me, or my disability
discrimination questionnaire or grievance letter or to make-up
a bundle, as well as being factually wrong about the law on time
limits) I asked the chair to bear this in mind in his written
judgment as
"...my
case is not against the T&G".
"I
cannot do that and I think you know the reason why not".
I guess he meant pressure
on tribunal chairs not to criticise union institutions. Otherwise
it would be odd to talk in riddles.
It's not
just me and my chair's riddle that say this. Two
ex- Unite - TGW officials argued it, but in their case the
chair disagreed.
She would say that, wouldn't
she?
- Appeal Judgments
are good examples of how judges like cases stated. Fine points
of law & exotic arguments distract from the basic legal position,
but read them for style, clarity and interest.
- Workrightsapp.com/
looks as though it only works on apple iphones. The same lawyers
used to write it online for Andrea Adams Trust where you may
have come-accross it.
- IAmBeingFired.co.uk/claimtest.html
- puts the employment law flow diagram online. This is funded
by people who use the Iambeingfired service to find a lawyer,
but the marginal cost of each use of their web site is next to
zero so there should be no sense of obligation to use them rather
than follow suggestions in step 4, below, or try the Just Employment
Law email and telephone service because it advertises on the
right and I am biassed. Or People Per Hour but their adverts
seem less common now; you could try going to their site and then
back to this one.
- Direct.Gov.UK/Employees(ex
Tiger.gov.uk ) is aimed at people still at work and trying to
negotiate on detail. (New employers get this).
- Londonlawcentre.org.uk/publications.html
publishes free-to-download booklets including cross-references
and book lists. In case that link isn't working, these are back-ups:Claimants Companion (March
2008) is here and Identifying
Employment Cases (February 2008) . Then get the most up-to-date
copy as soon as possible.
- Rapidocs' online grievance letter
template offers some background notes and a step-by-step approach
to writing a grievance letter and a grievance appeal with guidance
notes. Various online services allow you to play with the letter
template for free while a lot of the words are greyed-out (even
if you cut-and-paste) and add paid-for services like a charge
to download the full letter or an extra charge for telephone
advice.
Usually employees' employment law is right at the bottom of the
list of what they cover under a family and personal law section,
if they have one, and grievance is as the bottom of the employment
law list if they include it, because it is the most messy. Search
the infolaw page for "epoq" to find sites offering
the service. At the last look, Desktop Lawyer and AA legal included
the grievance letter service and grievance appeal letter at £8
each, while Halifax Legal Express leaves it off the list. MyLawyer
charges £65 for the two with qualified legal help by telephone
if you want it. There is a small discount on MyLawyer services
via Topcashback
and some adverts on the right as well.
infolaw.co.uk/lawfinder/results.asp?lwftp=Online+Legal+Services&lwfsc=Employment
...lits this an any other employment law document services that
might be emerging.
- When trying to make sense of events, it may turn-out that
the law is no help because at base it assumes that the job was
your manager's to give-and-take, with compensation for extremes
of behaviour which leave you suddenly out of work. Mrs Craddock
created the job for Sally, but withdrew it unreasonably fast
leaving her months of job-seeking before she could work for Mr
Ramsey.
In some instances this idea has clashed with
claimants' tribunals' and law makers' ideas sense of reality
and so "injury to feelings" and "discrimination"
have been bolted-on to the system. A good and well-argued case
by a lawyer can have these points added and in theory a case
by a claimant can have them added too, but a case put by a no-win
no-fee lawyer acting secretly to pay money to a union or a claims
management agency has no chance: the lawyer would settle before
reading the evidence. If you have so little money that you can
get legal aid (now renamed legal help) it only pays for about
4½ hours of preparation and no representation, which most
lawyers find is not enough to help them or you so they don't
accept it. A small exception exists for complex cases in Scotland.
One lawyer working for
Thompsons, the largest chain of lawyers acting just for trade
unions, argued quite rightly that Machiavellis who deliberately
as part of a kind of game of work force a nervous breakdown on
someone who's career and duty are the same - to run a childrens'
home or to be head of maths for example - should be convicted
of assault. Obviously they should, with clear conviction and
declaration of guilt, and with the help of the police and the
crown prosecution service.
At first judges agreed. They still agree a few times a year
in theory, when they hear appeal cases for psychiatric injury
in a batch, but there is no way of finding any sense in how they
pick the one token case to let-though or the other several to
turn-down on appeal. They do not want to judge psychiatric injury
cases against Machaiavellis. They said so. They would prefer
some kind of system of regulations that they can judge. In effect
they are on strike until MPs go to work and set-up a more detailed
by which they can do their job. MPs are also on strike, preferring
to pretend to be local councillors to get in the local paper
or just claim expenses or both because they have no chance of
influencing politics and don't want to say so. So both MPs an
judges are more or less on strike.
The Blair government and it's focus groups and gleaners of
Daily Mail headlines has also made Harassment a crimenal offence.
It acknowledges threats and harrasement in the street and tries
to judge it, but a recent case has removed threats to your job
from the definition of harassment. Car, yes; job no. (I
think). So far as I can tell the legal test is this. Imagine
you have become Tony Blair, looking back at the person you were
a second ago. Would he think the person a yob? Well he's an odd
person, but for electoral purposes he probably uses focus groups
paid for by back-handers from unions he would rather not know:
Yob? Mail Reader? Confusingly, there is no record of people using
focus group evidence in court to say "I know the system
is set up to get Daily Mail headlines for the governing pary,
your honour, and focus group research shows just that for my
case.". A jury system might be better but while psychiatric-injury
judges are on a strike or a work-to-rule, and harassment cases
are judged by telegraph-readers, the judicial system doesn't
work. It is paid a lot of money but it doesn't work.
 What has happened
is this. Imagine you work in the Sunderland portacabin where
drivers pay fines and towing fees to remove cars from a car pound
after a warden has claimed that the car was illegally parked
before towing-away. You are frightened of two people. Your bullying
boss with his machiavellian schemes and your car-less drivers
with their various opinions that may they may express by smashing
portakabin windows. The drivers that is. If the drivers do it
it is obviously harassment. They are obviously yobs. They live
in Sunderland after all. But if your boss does it is is not harassment
according to the law lords. Alan Ward, who we pay to be one of
these Law Lords added
"What on earth is the world coming to if conduct
of the kind that occurred in the third [unreported] incident
can be thought to be an act of harassment, potentially liable
to giving rise to criminal proceedings punishable with imprisonment
for a term not exceeding six months, and to a claim for damages  for anxiety and financial
loss?"
Comprendi? Maybe I've mis-read the case and thought the boss
did punch the windows out or do something which in the context
of power over employment does deserve six months. We are not
allowed to read what the "third incident"
is and it may have been a funny look at an office party or it
may have been a threat to punch the lights out of something,
someone, blame the employee and get them sacked for it without
a reference or future career. The first is a precious, tactical
thing that some people come-up with in tribunal cases. The second
is much more serious, I think, than if a stranger goes to your
home, punches out the windows and escapes for police to deal
with perhaps. If a stranger punches-out your windows at home,
I think the emotional strain is much less than if your employer
does something similar that happens to be at work.
If the offence was something like Anthony
Gubbey's attempt to make the best compromise of being chief
justice in Zimbabwe, which was eventually met by yobs at the
court gate threatening to punch-in the windows because he was
the servant and Mugabe was the master; of henchmen interrupting
his court cases and police not enforcing the law, of real threats
to his own safety so strong that he paid for his own guards then
you might think that six months is not long enough for Mugabe
and that Anthony Gubbey did a good job postponing the decline
of impartial law in that country. Click on the link above and
you will get a Daily Telegraph report of click on the photo for
BBC. The picture above is of Alan Ward at the court gate, possibly
looking at a Telegraph reporter's camera rather than Anthony
Gubbay looking at a well-trained government-funded henchmen who
take great delight in wearing their opponents down even when
violence is not possible, but the principal is the same and surprisingly
also the background; both had spouses or offspring suffering
from Alzheimer's or similar to add to stress outside work.
If Gubbay's stress levels over
long periods led to something like a nervous breakdown, facing
harassment at the court gate, you might think that Anthony Gubbay
is the person who should be able to sue like someone who has
suffered from criminals and even get perks like free police help,
free help from the crown prosecution service, and discouragement
of practices like intimidation of witnesses or financial settlement
before the end of the case under threat of an award of costs
to the other side. If you think that masters are always right
and servants are always rightly dismissed or perhaps dismissed
a little too quickly, then Mugabe is the one to believe in politics
and Lord Telegraph Reader or or whatever his highly-paid name
is is the one to believe in law. Oddly enough, the newspaper
that reports Anthoney Gubbey's attempt to soften the injustice
of shits in power, is not a great reporter of shits in power
in other large organisations like UK councils, government funded
social work and supported housing agencies, or whatever, where
a piece of shit can wield massive power over someone who like
Anthony Gubbey is just trying to do his job.
Oddly enough the man - I mean
the one in specs not the one who threatened to punch the windows
out and have his subordinates sacked for it by the personnel
department or the other man who resisted Robert Mugabe for years
- has probably never had a job for a machiavellian hierarchy
in his life. He has worked very hard and been very successful
in a different world of self-employment, conformity and good
performance, but his ideas about employment probably come from
the Daily Telegraph; instinctively he might believe that the
manager at Sunderland car pound somehow created a job that others
are borrowing, and that the issue is an unfair end to the relationship
causing loss of earnings to the servant while getting another
master, rather than use of power to punch peoples' mental specs
out by someone who has bluffed-his way into a job that we all
pay for. I may be wrong because on re-reading I see quite another
line of argument in the case that "the cold shoulder"
which is not pleasant but not harrasment either.
Oh I was on about whether Blair thinks you are a Yob. I can't
see you as I write so we will have to work it out together whether
you pass the"would Blair think you are a Yob?"
test. Government ministers have established a Quango Court that
decided that a teacher was not harassed in law by her headmaster
but that "undermining authority" was itself
a crime which might end her career. This is a Quango in Bermondsey,
not North Korea. I've been there, to visit the patent agent who
hire offices on the top floor. The same office block is used
for Care Standards Tribunals, Teachers Something Or Other Tribunals
(TSOOT) and odd vists from the union Certification Office that
nobody has heard of all seem to use the same building for their
monstrosities. But the patent agent above have a nice view: you
can see HMS Belfast out of the window.
This site is written in small parts and
the next paragraph may repeat.
The duty of care seems skewed in the employee's
favour for physical injuries, but in the employer's favour for
psychiatric injuries. Judges have no personal experience of being
bullied out of jobs over a long period and apparently
no professional interest. Complainants' go to tribunals for
a different reason, more like victims to a criminal court (Hammersley
page 10-11). The "just
and equitable extension of time limits" over three months
from the events complained about is arbitrary, and the presumption
is that two parties are settling small differences of money,
unlike a criminal court where it's assumed that the criminal
should be found guilty and discouraged from re-offence.
I suspect that policy-makers in political parties, like judges,
do not really believe that offences can be committed by employers
against employees except in a physical way. They think it's an
equal business relationship between contractors.
The result is that you get the muddle of a school where a
teacher is deliberately driven to a nervous breakdown through
Rachmanism - because she is a good teacher and on a high pay
scale - next to a chancer who sues for tripping on spillages
allowed to remain without proper warning signage according to
health and safety executive guidelines. My guess is that the
chancer has a lot more chance in court than the teacher and everyone
looses as a result - pupils, taxpayers, the remaining teachers:
everyone but unions if they get a kick-back for referring cases
to personal injury solicitors, and the political party which
takes a fair share of the missing millions that should be in
union bank accounts.
Meanwhile there is so much that seems instinctively wrong
about the treatment of staff by employers that a container-load
of special cases has been inserted into the system. It is like
a game of snakes and ladders. A few decades ago (according to
the preface of employment tribunal practice and precedents) employment
law was no longer called "The Master and Servant Act"
but still assumed that the master had made a job for the servant,
the servant had out-stayed his welcome, and exceptions were due
for breach of contract, minimum notice periods, and that was
about it. Even in those days the T&G
rule book made lawyers a priority but there was very little
employment law. Now special cases include wrongful dismissal
that is procedurally unfair (if you don't know what the job is
and act reasonably but still sack), discriminatory in terms of
race, gender, disability and to some extent sexuality, union
membership, whistle blowing, and so-on. Few would sue unless
hopping mad, desperate or chancers but the law is there. Likewise
few employers in the public sector would allow whistle blowing
for example: they find ways around the law. House of Lords judges
have more-or-less refused to assess psychiatric injury in their
own case law but the concept creeps back into the tribunal system
where an employer is on a weak case: overlapping injury to feelings
and psychiatric injury can turn a claim for a proportion of a
year's salary into a low multiple of that.
In practice, your lawyer rings
ACAS or the employer's insurance companies lawyer and has a conversation
about how much money to go away "for nuisance" and
then the employer is urged by their human resources contractor
to use more and more bureaucratic procedures to avoid risking
court again. The next generation of employees exploit manager's
attempts to get around cumbersome and inept procedure and win
the odd case. Managers rally-round those criticicised and it
does not damage their CVs. For example the chief executive of
Harringay Council was criticised by the report of the Victoria
Climbie inquiry into Harringay Social Services for being deliberately
distant to the point of negligence. You would expect, reading
the report, that he would resign. He did not. After the fuss
had died down he got a senior government quango job before picking
a fight with a journalist while drunk and resigning. Most of
the Machiavellis who insert themselves between taxpayer-funding
and those who have to do work for taxpayers are more lucky.
Do they begin to make sense to someone else? Did you read
the law right? What proof helps? Is the case strong enough and
valuable enough to take to a no-win no-fee solicitor? Are you
already past time limits? Do you need to write a grievance letter
or a questionnaire about discrimination before going to court,
and which court? Sanity-checking early ideas is something that
telephone lawyers can do. If you still have a contract with your
employer that may entitle you to use some kind of help line as
part of a benefits package. Community Legal Services is often
quoted as an advice line but it's means tested. Try these...
 Co-Operative.coop/Membership/
(or whatever the current page for new members is) is free to
join & once a member you're likely to get a better deal from
their free legal helpline for "initial legal advice".
This is marketed as a membership perk alongside the almost identical
"assessment" of whether they want to represent you,
which plenty of other solicitors on the Law
Society's find a solcitor page can offer face to face and
with better qualification. There may be no difference at all
in how you are treated, but by becoming a member you are repaying
them for the work of advising you, and they do ask for your membership
number. There's an interview with one of the paralegals here.
All such a person can do is explain how their off-the-cuff knowledge
of the law applies to your conversation about your case. At least
this is better than FirstAssist - the FirstAssist help line re-branded
by Unite the Union provided someone who said "it's a
contract - why shouldn't you have to follow a contract? Oh. I'm
not a specialist in employment law". According to the
video interview above, Co-op advisors do not have to be law society
members but are trained in Excel and can ask around the office.
The services quotes good feedback such as "Michael Greenwood
January 2010 - So far the service has been good, with good feedback,
information and guidance." 9-8 weekdays, 10-4 Saturdays.
- ACAS
has a tax-funded help line to
"answer
all your employment questions in one confidential phone call":
08457 47 47 47.
The ACAS help line's advice
is not means-tested, like advice from CLSDirect, and not limited
to people who are using employment tribunals, like the ACAS settlement
service. Weekdays 8-6.
- Whichlegalservice.co.uk/[deep
link]our-services/employment-advice/tribunal
https://www.topcashback.co.uk/share/employees/which-legal
/our-services/employment-advice/tribunal
(see
right) is around £50 a year and slower to respond with
shorter hours, but they do have a couple of practising specialist
employment lawyers to ring you back so their advice on how tribunals
and laws work in practice - rather than what the law says on
paper - is likely to be better . Which Legal Service is the best
option for anyone who can afford it. Call weekdays 8.30-6. In
newspaper interviews they have claimed to be willing to dictate
letters about small claims, but they won't read faxed documents
and a few years ago would not advise by email. Good questions
to ask are whether a case could be worth enough to take to a
no-win no-fee lawyer, or be simple enough to handle alone, or
whether any more work could me done to tidy it up if it is on
the boundary between the two. Recently they've added a "members
area" with a few template letters and guides.
- DAS Instant Law Line is similar to Which Legal Service, but
charges by the month instead of by the year in the hope that
some people will subscribe for years at a time. Their telephone
legal advice is as limited as others.
"Instant Law Line can only give telephone advice and
can't accompany you to court. The helpline service cannot help
in the following circumstances: if your legal query does not
relate to a specific legal problem, to legally assess correspondence
or provide written advice, or advice relating to immigration,
agricultural and ecclesiastical law."
"Legal advice under this service is for general advice only,
and as our legal advisers are unable to take in correspondence
or case files, we would be unable to provide the in-depth advice
required in these situations. If you wish to discuss general
questions regarding legal procedures, we would be able to help."
- If you are the sort of person who buys home contents insurance,
there might be a legal telephone help line or even insurance
to pay basic lawyers' costs for cases with a 50% chance of success
bundled with what you've got. AA home insurance is an example.
More Than offer it - with a free set of guided template letters
- as an extra. Most home insurers will reduce their price for
a higher minimum payment and a lower maximum payment. If you
are in a bad trades union and don't have a dispute with your
employer, you might want to take out minimum home contents cover
with maximum excess, using a firm that includes legal insurance,
as a precaution for the future.
My
trades union offers the same First Direct legal help line under
the "Care Xpress" brand except
about employment law or disputes with the union. They do not
give a reason for this exclusion or warn members of it. Maybe
even telephone advice can make a difference that they don't want
you to know. Oddly enough the employer paid for help lines -
almost unknown to the staff but available if anyone asked human
resources about them - for telephone counselling and for legal
information. The provider was DAS who seemed quite unsure what
the specific deal was at my employer and didn't exclude legal
advice while I still had a contract, even when off sick. I never
tried the telephone counselling but the legal advice was better
than First Direct by a long way. At first direct someone said"It's
a contract. Why shouldn't they enforce a contract?"Then
after being told why said "I'm not an employment specialist".
On the same subject, the branch lawyer at T&G 1/1148
claims to have supervised the Capita legal advice help line.
My employment tribunal chair had to correct him about the law
of time limits. In a second pre-hearing review after I had sacked
the man I was told "he was a bad lawyer - I'll give
you that".
- https://www.emplaw.co.uk/emplaw/employee/research-employee.aspx
gives the useful basic position in employment law & refers
to employment case law. It is more up-to-date than printed text-books,
but if you prefer prose and paper go to a book shop or a reference
library, find a book with a style and level of detail you like
and then buy a copy: you can sell it on the web later. My dud
union lawyer taught me one thing, which is to stick post-it notes
into a book and jot things on them when you are trying to avoid
eye contact in the tribunal waiting room, and that is a good
way to add notes to a legal text book. (If you want to see a
free staff handbook, DAS
provides a long one and ACAS provides free short ones.)
- You have to pay to see the cases on Emplaw (my union had
a subscription but wouldn't let me use it) but you can often
find them for free on Bailii.org such as United
Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal cases, which are written
down and binding on ordinary tribunals. The
Employment Act and employment rights laws tend to come-up
on Google. Those the government wants to re-enforce have free
.pdf download text books in clearer English. The Disability Discrimination
Act even has a free help line attached to tell you which part
applies (details on the ACAS site above). Conversely the laws
that the government wishes did not exist at work, such as the
Protection from Harassment Act, get over-turned willy-nilly at
appeal courts.
- Evidence of what the other side were doing might be available
from a Data Protection Act subject access request. This
is the Information Commissioners pdf guide for users. Direct
employees of government can try the Freedom
of Information Act too.
- You may be able to help someone else or see a similar question
answered on ConsumerActionGroup.co.uk/Forum/Employment-Problems
Solicitors are over £100 an hour or double - worth it
if they can settle convincingly, or put points simply. A simple
health and safety personal injury case is just up their street,
or negotiating a compromise agreement with a half sane employer
and employee who both treat it as business and can take the decision
to stop.
If you have the messiest
case with the lowest payout, the legal trade isn't good at helping.
The pretence of being paid by insurers or unions when sometimes
no-win no-fee and paying commission is a bad start. Firms like
Shoesmiths who do this would argue that they can cut costs by
working a production-line of near-identical pre-vetted cases,
but if it doesn't work out like that in practice there may not
be much that a junior lawyer can do about it. Most firms have
picked-up a culture of office costs, long commutes, and top-heavy
salaries almost as much as banks. The most junior lawyers have
to work almost for free. According to one firm quoted
in the Law Gazette,
"Most
fee-earners at a traditional firm will take home 20-30% of their
billing target. Being a freelance lawyer means you set your own
target and keep about 85% of it."; "lawyers have been
‘overworked and overpriced’ ... for too long. "
To get more out of the legal
trade you have to make things easier for them. One technique
- imposed by some trade union lawyers who are appointed at the
last minute - is for the lawyer to sit-in and advise at a tribunal
and before while the ex employee puts the case. You might offer
to work that way.
A more rare
lawyers' technique is to go back to the traditional model of
partnerships, with less of the long commutes, expensive office
addresses and over-paid senior staff. The buzzword to google
is "virtual law"; more people do it each year and this
list is from the late 2000s. Keystone
Law (formerly Lawyers Direct) and Halebury.com
worked mainly work for employers at the last look. Virtuallaw.eu
in London and Scomo.com
in the Midlands and Northwest do some work for employees, while
a quick search on People Per Hour finds a couple of law society
members based in London and Bolton.
Another
technique is to find the nearest employment lawyer and approach
them in the most direct way, rather than through a claims handling
agency. Many lawyers will argue your right to choose a lawyer
after first assessment to an insurer or trades union if either
of those should in theory be paying.
Council-run reference libraries tend to include one per council
with a collection of lawyers' directories and law books. Some
popular or slightly out of date ones are dotted around other
branches. If you join the library and then log-on to their web
site from home, they may have some law books to read on screen.
Quickest, though, is to start online.
- Solicitors-Online.com
diverts to the LawSociety.org.uk's database of individual employment
law solicitors by distance from a post code & speciality:
a specialist is vital. Many give a home address but work from
the firm's office. The listing says whether they do a fixed-fee
interview, typically for half an hour and sometimes free, to
assess a claim. Best to check if you can get legal aid before
the meeting, or most of the half hour will be spent talking about
money, and this is the only half-hour that you know
they will spend on reading your evidence or trying to get on
a wavelength and understand what's important to you. Another
detail is the number of members in a firm, which you can compare
to the number of staff listed on 192.com to find out if this
is a call-centre
outfit with very few lawyers. BBH in the photograph for example
is among those who used ripped-off
sick miners who they offered to help with the compensation scheme,
in some cases paying commission to trade unions to get a list
of victims. Solicitors online mentions whether individual
lawyers are on any government or law society panels; you can
also check whether they are members of the Employment
Lawyers Association on that website, which is otherwise not
much use for finding a lawyer.
- find-legal-advice.justice.gov.uk
is a gov.uk search page for solicitors who take legal aid and
law centres listed by distance from your post code.
It misses some un-subsidised but free law centres that are listed
on the laworks.co.uk site: Hammersmith is listed on the government
site; Richmond is not.
justice.gov.uk/legal-aid
has an online calculator to work-out that you are not eligible
for legal aid because you have recently been employed,. In
order to be on the database, firms have to use a high proportion
of staff on fairly ordinary wages. Competent solicitors are usually
well-qualified law society members used to working intensively
and advising a client how best to solve a problem with a very
good knowledge of law, tactics, and the evidence available. They
cost at least £100 an hour. Government legal help pays
something like 4½ hours maximum at usual rates for case
preparation and nothing for representation, so the database is
not aimed at finding the best local solicitor but anyone at all,
qualified or not, who will attempt the work and many enquiries
are channelled into the government's own cheap mail-order claims
preparation service. The purpose is not so much to help claimants,
but to avoid Daily Mail headlines saying that claimants can't
help: bad service is harder for a journalist to prove than none.
Somebody with zero money, a simple case, and little skill or
confidence in putting it together might find the service useful.
- Venables.co.uk -
lists lawyers who give initial consultations by phone or email,
solicitors with a lot of free information on their web sites,
and directories of lawyers
Rapoports.co.uk
was one that would have been hard to find without her site. If
you want to sue a trade union, you type "Trade Union"
or "Unison" or "British Medical Association"
into the box and find that three lawyers are listed (it's 61
for "bank"). Individual lawyers' employment appeals
tribunals are also minuted on bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/
- Lawyerlocator.co.uk
is Butterworths solicitors' directory online, with plenty of
legal explanations added
- Waterlow Legal |
Public | Employment is another legal directory gone online,
listing firms by post code. This can search only for no-win no-fee
employment solicitors or legal firms where some of the staff
speak a certain language.
- Other employment law solicitor
league tables like Chambers (online and in libraries) exist
but tend to pick-out employment solicitors firms more than individual
employment lawyers. The firms are then more likely to charge
a corporate-client rate per hour for employment law. If you livenear
an employment tribunal and can ever attend morning weekday
hearings, go to have a look and write your own Chambers guide
to top lawyers before hiring one. (The minister has recently
renamed them "centres" for clarity). Finally, TakeLegalAdvice.com allows feedback
from customers who have posted short summery cases for lawyers
to bid on.
- Solicitor.info is the tripadvisor or the solicitors' world,
often giving good reviews and local contacts.
- Claims management
agencies have to register whether they might take an employment
case, even if they only take the largest ones in practice, and
what county they are based in. This makes the register itself
hard to use for finding a lawyer and most are geared to assessing
claims over the phone anyway. (Unions are exempt from this even
though T&G for example seems little more than a claims management
agency). Legal firms that do not use law society members at all
are also listed.
One that
works for the employee's side - Humane
Resources has appeared in the Employment Appeals Tribunal
(search for Melia).
Claims
management agencies advertise heavily for personal injury work,
which pays better, and some of them take some employment law
cases. I'm told by an employer that they do a good job on a simple
case in which one or two phone calls can list the evidence and
challenge the employer to settle or risk the cost of a tribunal.
At the other extreme, a stress case based on reams of evidence
about machiavellian goings-on, no no-win no-fee lawyer is likely
to touch it except, perhaps, as someone who sits-in to give advice
to a person representing themselves and then claims 20% legal
costs which the claimant could not have got on their own. Even
this deal might not attract a lawyer, so for stress cases it's
best to go as directly as possible to a lawyer - rather than
through an agency - and to choose one close to a tribunal.
- Hybrid advice lines, letter-template-collections
and booklets exist
Delia Venables
lists solicitors who will give initial advice for free by email,
but they do this on the understanding that if your ½ hour's
assessment leads to a good case, they'll get the work plus 20%
costs from the other side if they win and most likely x% out
of your winnings or £100+ an hour because employment costs
awarded do not reflect the complexity of real life cases caused
by employers deliberately trying to do one thing and seem to
do another. If they are bad employers, for you to pretend not
to understand would be for you to be a bad employer of solicitors.
If you genuinely can't afford this, better to see the same solicitor
volunteering to work for free at a law centre. If you can afford
this and would, best to consider a solicitor very near to the
tribunal where the case would be heard or to you and specialising
in your kind of case. If the case is personal injury, the same
applies but to county courts. County courts only hear cases argued
by law society members if the claim is over £1,000 I think.
Another category exists of people
who would not help you at a tribunal but will offer cheaper advice
in assembling a claim.
MyGrievance.co.uk
web site has closed. The service was offered by Adrian Melia,
who, alongside other careers such as being a composer, is a human
resources consultant and has argued legal cases right-up to the
employment tribunals appeals tribunal. The tribunals service
does not require representatives to be members of the law society,
although non-union claims management agencies have to be registered
with the Financial Services Authority and Adrian Melia is registered.
His site also has a forum for interested people to write to each
other and he would be willing to offer human resources consultancy
to employers. As someone who has an interest in workplace bullying,
his services have mainly been used by employees.
Tribunal
Action in Wales gets bad reviews around the net.
does not offer to represent at a tribunal but does offer phone
and email help in getting a case together from download-able
booklets and template letters. The firm is run by a single law
society member, and does not write on the web site what other
help lines or individuals are involved. On the face of it, it
seems a sensible service.
One trade union
tried advertising an after-the-event service on google. Employment
contracts or the bits of staff handbooks they refer to often
allow a "friend or union representative" to
witness a sticky meeting like a dismissal. For the next year
or two it can legally be "recognised union"
but that will doubtless change and is not common anyway. The
important thing is that the contract tries to stop you hiring
a solicitor to come with you to meet Mr Sugar. Friends may melt
away at this point and unions are rare outside the public-funded
sector because unions are so bad at their job. You could claim
the solicitor is a friend and see if the other side proves not.
It's expensive. Or one claims management agency recommends a
pay-as-you-go union with qualified accounts at the certification
office, stating that their accountant does not quite know where
they get their money from after looking at the membership receipts.
Whether their witnessing of the meeting is good value or comes
with a small-print contract to use the same claims management
agency I don't know.
- Rapidocs from Epoq / Desktop
Lawyer / AA legal / MyLawyer
Rapidocs from Epoq tries to assemble grievances by type of law,
with pop-up notes to suggest what each kind covers. It's an unusual
approach. Most lawyers try to write a grievances in date order,
but anything clear will do; you could try two drafts, one in
date order and one in order of laws referred-to.
MyLawyer.co.uk
is the re-branded version of Epoq.co.uk Rapidocs service with
a legal helpline
£60 pays for a grievance letter, a grievance appeal letter,
and telephone advice on the limited question of how to draft
them from a qualified UK lawyer.
Epoq.co.uk runs several services providing legal documents as
forms to fill-in and print-out, sometimes with a limited helpline
to qualified lawyers, or as an office service to laywers and
businesses. Typically they can help draft tenancy documents,
powers of attorney, or debt collection letters for unpaid wages,
but their websites do have draft letters for employee grievance
and grievance appeal. Epoq's brand for business documents is
Rapidocs. For consumers and small business, they tried running
a service called Desktop
Lawyer, which had trouble
defining its service in the 2000s but still running as a
supplier of form documents, including free sample documents (I
don't know the catch) or fully-printable documents with a "courtesy
call" for £8 a grievance letter and £8 for an
appeal.
Similar services have been rebranded as part of More Than home
insurance policies, and as Halifax Legal Solutions, which does
not include grievance letter templates (only ones requesting
to take a dog to work and about parental leave). If you have
one of these as a freebie with some other product, it would be
worth checking to see whether they've included it since the last
check.
- Student and volunteer solicitors can be googled
with "law works" (including the quotes) or "pro
bono" and using a map search or adding a place
name. New colleges are adding volunteer schemes for free legal
advice all the time but one co-ordinating charity, Law Works,
says that it can often take up to 8 weeks to find a volunteer,
depending on the area and the time of year. Other charities,
some state-funded and others not like Public
Concern at Work, offer help on specialised areas of law such
as whistle blowing by email or phone.
Some councils fund free lawyers
in the same very low-budget way that they fund advice centres,
as employees of a separate grant-funded law centre which is in
theory a separate charity. Law centre services are most likely
means-tested; mainstream advice centres never. The book "Employment
Tribunals, Tactics and Precedents"published by Legal
Action Group gives an idea of how late these agencies take qualifying
cases, how little money they are willing to put into services
like preparing a bundle of documents, and how quickly they drop
cases in order to get-on with the next one. A free PDF text book
The
Claimants Companion by Tamara Lewis is in a similar
style (link from another DIY Employment Law site Employment-lawyers.org.uk)
LawWorks.org.uk
has links to some of all three types of service - law centre,
citizens advice bureau and advice services alliance - by place
name. Probonouk.net lists
volunteer lawyers too. Advice centres are usually parts of the
national franchises Advice
UK [dismissal
page] (formerly Federation of Independent Advice Centres)
and the better-known of the two - Citizens
Advice Bureau [dismissal
page]. Often the local branches will be a separate organisation
with their own web page listing opening times, what they think
their services are, who they want to see, and thanking
the council for their generous grant which is not what you want
to read if you want them to help you sue the council. Often,
advice centres will employ one volunteer to advise on all possible
subjects including employment law by looking-up the Advice Centres
Alliance or CAB web site and reading it out to you. My CAB tried
ringing my union to find out why they weren't backing me. The
union official responded by pretending not to be in and not returning
calls. It is a sign of how legalistic and arbitrary the tribunal
system has become that unqualified advice workers generally won't
act as advocates in a tribunal, any more than union officials
or employers' human resources staff will, despite union-failure.html
page, next.
- Footnote about Alcohol Recovery
Project, a public-funded employer trying to reduce the harm
caused by compulsive drinking.
Or maybe say
that drinking is wrong: they are not entirely sure and the trustees
have spent much of their time discussing what ARP stands for
in between defending
tribunal cases against 3% of the entire ARP staff in 2006.
By chance their staff are quite good at the work and some of
the set-ups they use, like a drop-in shopfront with free group
work for people trying to stay sober, are better than the others
for most people most of the time. If you don't live in London,
the formula is called a community alcohol service and you might
find something similar in large towns, or a drug-and-alcohol
service in smaller ones.
Anyone
can see from Alcohol Recovery Project's web site that they set-up
to do useful work with many but small government grants to claim,
endless interference with management from user-groups, inspectors,
funders, and trustees or counsellors, their managers have very
little time to find-out what the work really is, what good work
is being done, and what the more enterprising staff want to do
to improve things. There is meant to be a system if interminable
meetings' views fed-up-and-fed-up the management line, but the
system only passes credit upwards and blame downwards, so if
anything goes wrong it is the practitioners fault and not the
managers'.
If you have an
alcohol problem, note that they only had a handful of qualified
supervised counsellors working in South London and most of their
staff are therefore forced to manage the demand for counselling
while pretending that the work is assessing or running a group
or responding to feedback from residents. Groups are quite limited.
Mostly, as in any social work organisation, it is about assessments
because it looks good on paper to say"our staff did
a thousand assessments", you can have paperwork to
prove it and nothing has to have been done that is useful or
can fail and show you up for not having a clue. If a staff member
should ask for an OK to send a list of suggestions about the
referral form, or ask a director how requests can be passed-up
the management line, either act can be taken as reason for events
which staff complain about at employment tribunals.
If you are ARP's
lawyer, please note Wang v CNC markets, a bit of case law
that says someone can be paid £2,500 nuisance to go away
because the legal system doesn't work, or whatever happened to
Wang, and still be a nuance and not be sue-able.
If you are one of ARP's trustees, shocked that
your organisation's fecklessness and cruelty to clients and staff
should be exposed on the web, please first remember that Kingston University has
a whole website doing nothing else with business as usual,
so it is no nuisance to get het-up about or bang the table at
the next trustee's meeting and note that I am happy to help reduce
the incompetence and bullying at the old firm if you want to
ask advice. I'll even sit on the board of trustees once a month
with you if you want. I did write to each of you personally twice
and despite working for the employer for seven years I was refused
a chance to meet this mystery committee and got a failed attempt
at unfair dismissal instead. It was something about slamming
doors. The manager you asked to make the allegation was so thick
and dishonest that she forgot there were dampers on the doors
but she remained in post in order that the could try the same
again later. I am also rude to Suzan
Kramer MP, The Transport
and General Workers' Union, Amicus, The Union of Democratic
Mine workers and Beresfords
solicitors, DAS Legal Insurance (by quoting a link to a critic),The Labour Party, The
Conservative Party (who take money from my ISA manager),
and Mr Andrew Gumbiti-Zimuto, the tribunal chair. More people
are insulted by this site than read it in a typical day and nobody
else has cared enough to get in touch In fact by insulting a
trade union I have helped the management at ARP who are also
known for dismissing union reps.
Employers
appearing at the employment appeals tribunal and on surveys of
workplace bullying show similarities: quango-funding; committee
management, few pressures on them to know what it is that they
actually do and who their good staff are or who are the less
productive ones. Another aspect is that their staff are working
for something beyond just the money, which law doesn't recognise.
Ambulance staff report a lot of workplace bullying but the law
would say
"why didn't
you leave the injured on the pavement and walk into Tesco to
ask for a job? This is just about loss of earnings for overly
quick dismissal, not how the ambulance service is managed even
if it is mismanaged in order to find ways of getting rid of troublemaking
staff rather than managed for the patients on the pavement".
Look
Ahead, a hostel organisation, gets in the employment appeals
tribunal top-of-the-pops more than once; Kingston University
is an organisation that has inspired its own web site about employment
practices.
Another trend
amongst organisations that might make case law on appeals and
are reported is that a lot of them have funny names. The sole
example of psychiatric-injury-by-post is about a parish council's
country walks projects, which might have amused a judge; Fatti
v. Look Ahead must have amused a judge and Wang v CNC Markets
speaks for itself. Usually, judges take the job for the state
pension that they would not have got as barristers but sometimes
they are moved to agree with a change. If you have a funny name,
maybe you'll succeed where nobody has persuaded an appeal judge
before.
http://ethicalfashionforum.ning.com/profiles/blogs/better-than-fairtrade-tariffs
To write a link to this page, choose from the
main url or (as described on this Consumer
Action Group page))
http://employees.org.uk#1
- find which UK employment laws apply to you
http://employees.org.uk#2 - check your employment
law ideas by phone
http://employees.org.uk#3
- check the basic position in law, and the full text of laws
or cases
http://employees.org.uk#4
- find a solicitor at this stage or claim yourself
http://employees.org.uk#5 - register yourself as
someone interested in something better
|
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Telephone advice for about £80 a year - appeals not
covered - price offers vary
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My Lawyer guides you online through the process of writing a
letter to your employer and a grievance appeal letter. The Employee
grievance pack gives you the capability to voice any grievances
you have with your employer by arranging a grievance meeting,
setting out the details of the grievance and to subsequently
appeal the outcome of the meeting, should you be dissatisfied
with it, by setting out your grounds of appeal. The Grievance
appeal letter included in this pack is only suitable for use
regarding incidents that took place after 6th April 2009. The
questionarre guides you through legal rights such as your contract
and employment laws. A lawyer can then review your draft before
you send the letter. There is 20% off the cost of this service
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A free demonstration version with no advice and vital words blanked
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amazonanonymous.org
- Poverty Wages
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Free co-op membership allows "initial legal advice"
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Discount available
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Telephone advice for about £80 a year - appeals not
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Telephone advice for about £80 a year - appeals not
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P2Pmoney
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