Company That Labelled Employees as Self-Employed Receives Comeuppance

Many businesses that persist in labelling their employed staff as self-employed have met their comeuppance during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was certainly so in the case of a company that was ordered to pay compensation of more than £50,000 to a woman who was sacked after asserting her…

Dec 07, 2021

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The company ran a beauty salon at which the woman was engaged to work as PA to the founder and to provide treatments. Her contract was labelled as a consultancy agreement. When the pandemic struck, the company maintained that none of its staff could be placed on furlough because they were self-employed.

Although the woman carried on with her PA role and continued to be paid, she took up her colleagues’ cause. She asserted to the founder that the company’s staff were in fact full-fledged employees; that they should be paid via the PAYE system; that they had various employment rights and that they had the ability to be furloughed.

The company soon afterwards terminated her contract with immediate effect, ostensibly on grounds that the pandemic meant that it no longer had the funds to pay her. She was not invited to any meeting, nor was she afforded any right of appeal. She received no payment in lieu of notice and it was not long after her departure that a new member of staff was engaged to replace her.

Ruling on her case, an Employment Tribunal (ET) had no hesitation in finding that she was an employee. The reality of the situation was that she worked full time under the direct control of the founder. She could not provide a replacement to perform her work and her contract contained some quite draconian restrictive covenants that would not be appropriate for a self-employed consultant.

She enjoyed whistleblowing protection in that her assertions to the founder concerning her colleagues’ employment rights were made in the public interest and in good faith. Given the swift recruitment of her replacement, the ET reached the inescapable conclusion that she lost her job because she had made protected disclosures and that her dismissal was thus automatically unfair. The company was ordered to pay her a total of £50,390 in compensation.

Financial Consultant Who Failed to Disclose Bankruptcy Fairly Dismissed

You would generally be right to think that what goes on in your life away from your workplace is nobody’s business but your own. In one case, however, a financial consultant’s failure to disclose his bankruptcy to his employer was ruled by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) to be a sufficient ground for dismissal. The man, who worked for an estate agency, was suffering financial difficulties after prolonged periods on sick leave and was declared bankrupt at his own behest. His bankruptcy came…

EAT Rejects Unauthorised Deduction from Wages Claim

The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has rejected an appeal against the dismissal of an employee’s complaint that unauthorised deductions had been made from his wages because he did not receive an additional day’s pay or a day off in lieu when he worked on bank holidays. The employee’s contract of employment stated that he could be required to work on bank holidays, and that he would be paid at double time for those days and given an alternative day of leave in lieu. When he worked on a bank…

Highway Authority Not Responsible for Catastrophic M25 Lorry Crash

Those involved in catastrophic road accidents frequently point the finger of blame at potholes or other defects in the road surface. As one case showed, however, it can be an uphill task to pin responsibility for such accidents on highway authorities. The case concerned an accident which befell an articulated lorry whilst works were in progress to convert a stretch of the M25 into a smart motorway. The lorry was using the hard shoulder when its wheels strayed onto the verge and over a filter…