Research Employment Law And Employer-employees Conflicts (Case Study Sample)

Employment Laws in Management
Name of Student
Institutional Affiliation
Employment Laws
Executive Summary
A business or organizational set up has players that make every process a success. Each player is always accredited with specific tasks at various levels of leadership. In most cases, the two principal parties are the employers and employees. In such setups, given the interaction of the different people with different ideologies, sometimes conflicts arise. The conflicts can be employee-employee conflict or employer-employee conflict. This paper is based on the employer-employee conflict that befell a wine importer agency that resulted in the dismissal of four employees at a go in different circumstances without consideration of the Employment termination principles.
Des Cole and Sarah Cole co-own a private merchant store that imports and stocks rare but popular brand of wine. The firm has four competent employees led by the manager, Kelly, who has managed to streamline the operations of the business for years. This has made the owners reluctant in visiting the store occasionally given that everything is always in order in their absences. The situation changes when Kelly, the manager, succumbs to injuries at the workplace that forces her to stay in bed and away from work. The Assistant Manager, Graham takes charge, and things begin to go wrong. What follows is a progressive dismissal of all the four employs on different counts.
Main Claims against the Employees Dismissal
Consequentially, each of the fired employees comes with a solicitor who submits the requirement to be met by the firm before firing them. The following are the main claims that arose: Unfair dismissal, Working tie regulations, Constructive dismissal, Sex discrimination, and Breach of Public Interest Disclosure Act.
Unfair dismissal
As seen from the case study, Des and Sarah subjects all the four employees; Diane, Ralph, Kelly, and Graham to unfair dismissal. In the UK employment law, unfair dismissal is one of the commonly breached rules that many employers find themselves answering to in courts. As Selvidge (2006) asserts, every employee that has the qualifying period of service records is not vulnerable to unfair dismissal. The law requires that the employer provides relevant and genuine reasons towards the unfair dismissal. Various categories qualify an unfair dismissal with the prime one being the employees’ incapability to perform as per the employment terms. Des and Sarah never took into consideration all the categories before opting for the dismissal of the employees; something that would subject them to uncertainties during the court process.
Working time Regulations
The working time regulations are set to help both the employers and employees in managing the time well without straining any of the two parties. It is the standard yard of determining the extent of work and the required number of employees needed to tackle the work within the stipulated period. Without the working time regulations, the employer might tend to frustrate the employees by overworking them. On the other hand, an employee might equally work for short time and demand for higher payment. Therefore, just as Philp and Wheatley (2013) puts it clear, the working time regulations leads to a more established and flexible working approach. Furthermore, it is what has created other methods such as shifts and job sharing as the employers would tend to cope with the 24/7 demand. This is the point of bargain by Ralph against dismissal.
Constructive dismissal
The principle of constructive dismissal also applies in this case study and involves the owners of the company and the one Kelly, who succumbs to frustrations originating from her well-played role in the enterprise. Constructive dismissal is all about fundamental violation of the employees’ rights by the employer through that induces severity feeling that can subject the employee to self-declared dismissal. In this case, the initial termination statement does not originate from the employer but rather from the employee.
Breach of Public Interest Disclosure Act
Public Interest Disclosure Act is a law that requires for the protection of an employee who has come up with a proper information concerning other employees conduct. An employee must be protected at all levels since some information can be so risky and can make one’s life insecure. According to Gobert and Punch (2009), the formation of the Public Interest Disclosure Act aims at providing safe environment for the employee who has reported some vital information about others. Similarly, it is not allowed to mention the actual name of the employee who has provided the information.
Sex discrimination
As per The Equality Act 2010, sex discrimination is termed as the unlawful mistreatment of an employee by an employer based on the sex. Normally, this has been a big issue of concern on the male employer to female employee context. The same arises especially when the other employees of a different sex are treated differently. To Kelly, she has it that she is facing the frustrations simply because she is a woman.
The Strengths of Each Case
Even though they never expected anything legal to follow their careless dismissal of employees, Des and Sarah must now come to reality concerning the content of each letter by the various solicitors.
Unfair dismissal
The law against unfair dismissal is at hand facing the duo. All the four letters from the four attorneys representing the four employees contains the issue of unfair dismissal. As set out in the UK's Employment Rights Act 1996, for an employee’s termination to be rated as fair, there must be some categories that apply and can be proved by the employer. To begin with, the employee must have been found to be lacking the qualities to serve in the stated company. The company is already failing in this since the employees had served for long just to show lack of qualification or competence at a later time. Therefore, all the dismissed workers have defeated the company on these grounds
Secondly, another scenario that can attract an employee’s fair dismissal is when proved to be having poor attendance, dishonesty, and failure to follow instructions. Again on this, these employees were the best and most compliant. This is evident from the frequency with which the owners of the company could visit their retail shop. Similarly, the dismissed employees are not guilty of the same.
Working time Regulations
Working time regulations is one of the laws that the likes of Des were never aware of. Just as presented by Ralph Bloom’s solicitor, the employer was not in order by discontinuing his employment. Going by their arguments, the employee was bargaining on facts which are outlined in the Acts of Employment but ended up losing the job despite being factual and right. Ralph is not given a day off weekly as stipulated in the working time regulations.
Furthermore, the employer is seen to have gone against the law because after forcing Ralph to take up duties for two consecutive weeks, he ignores what he is required to and does the opposite. As asserted by Dembe (2011), in a situation where the employee has to work even on his free day, possibly due to unavoidable circumstance, the employee should get compensation for the days workedin the form of compensatory rest . The employer, therefore, never considered the compensatory rest which the employee was qualified to access. These show how strong Ralph’s solicitor can stand against the employers in the court of law.
Constructive dismissal
Constructive dismissal is a unique kind of termination of duties whereby the one to be dismissed initiates the dismissal. This always occurs when the employee is fed up with everything and has nothing more to do apart from quitting. However, an occurrence of a constructive dismissal is an automatic assurance of mistreatments within the company Paul and Seeberger (2012). Most human resource scholars attribute a constructive dismissal to problems from the employer’s side.
Going by Kelly’s situation, she is already in a sympathetic situation with her car getting vandalized because she spoke to save a situation. To her surprise, even after establishing that the cause of all her misfortunes is in line with the information that she gave, the employers ignores her plea with the strongest possible excuse ever. She feels desolated and hopeless on realizing that the employers cannot appreciate the step she took in unfolding the rightful information but rather leave her in a suffer-alone situation. To her, going away from the firm can yield her some peace and that is why she opts to resign.
Breach of Public Interest Disclosure Act
The Employment Rights Act 1996 section 43 B identifies the types of disclosures that qualify for protection. Even in the case of Graham and Jack’s conduct of doing their private business within their employer’s premises qualifies Kelly to receive protection against that information. Section 43A part 1 says that a qualifying disclosure for protection is one in which the disclosure has proof that a criminal offense has been committed, or is being committed, or is likely to be committed (Gobert & Punch 2009).
In essence, Kelly needed protection against her disclosure since the employers proved beyond reasonable doubt that the two were engaging in illegal business in his premises. Besides, the culprits themselves admitted having committed the offense. In case the employers would have protected Kelly, without mentioning her name as the one who reported the issue, she would not have suffered what she suffered. However, it is quite sad that...