- 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;
brokers can get it separately
for ten or twenty pounds a year.
- 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
and unreasonable memos at home. 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 clamp 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"; "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".
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.
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. 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 and 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. If someone
is unpleasant and unfair, but creates a job which someone fills
for a time, then employment law makes some sense but is too complex.
The reason it is complex is that over the years, practitioners
have recognised other situations and built-up a kind of snakes-and-laddres
game of special cases. The kind of situation is where a courtier
takes over an NHS trust or a vuluntary organisation or PLC and
puffs-up the director's perks while cutting pay for the people
who do the work, and then quite rightly feels a certain insecurity
and guilt about complaints, employment law does not know what
to do.
These people are Machiavellis. They do it full time, like hardened
criminals comitting crimes and with similar consequences. When
they are so used to it that they begin to leave clues, the clues
need time and care to interpret in context like the clues left
by criminals. In contrast, someone is quoted above as saying
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. This can be a good thing to do when
waking up at three in the morning thinking about work. Some people
write their final complaint by hand and are even more notorious
amongst lawyers.
- 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 barrester 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
embarass trades unions who fund the party that gives them their
jobs. I got the same tribunal chair who's judgement 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 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
judgement 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, and to talk in riddles if he did.
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.
When trying to make sense of events, it may turn-out that
the law is no help. For example 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
have become Tony Blair, looking back at the person you were a
second ago. Would he think you are a yob or a mail-reading marginal
voter? To be more factual, imagine you work in the Sunderland
portacabin where drivers pay fines and fees to remove cars from
a car pound after a warden has claimed that the car was illegally
parked and had it towed 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 harrasment. They are obviously yobs. They
live in Sunderland after all. But if your boss does it is is
not harrasment 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 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?"
Compendi? Oddly enough the man has probaly never had a job for
a machiavellian hierachy in his life. He has worked very hard
and been very successful in a different world of self-employment
and performance, but his ideas about employment probably come
from the Daily Telegraph.
An illustraion of 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. Judgees have no personal experience of being bullied
out of jobs over a long period and apparently
no professional interest. Complainents' 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 trubunal practice and precidents) 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, whistleblowing, and so-on. Few would sue unless hopping
mad, desparate or chancers but the law is there. Likewise few
employers in the public sector would allow whistleblowing 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 creaps 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 neusance" and then the employer is
urged by their human resources contractor to use more and more
beurocratic procedures to avoid risking court again. The next
generation of employees expoit 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 Victia 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 texpayer-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.
- http://www.Co-Operative.coop/Membership/
(or whatever the current page for new members is) is free to
join and once a member you can use their free legal helpline.
Loads
of people join.You don't have to be a customer of one of
the participating consumer co-ops to join free and use the phone
line, but if you do use their services they may even pay you
a tiny dividend each year. The service is developing towards
being a no-win no-fee legal service, but phone advice is provided
as a membership perk. The lawyers are not specialists in employment
law and can't see paperwork, so all that is left for them to
do is explain how their off-the-cuff knowledge of the law applies
to your conversation about your case. This is probably fine,
but many managers have nothing to do but make unfair dismissal
as complicated as possible while many employees are just as unreasonable
while case law is changing all the time and experience of real
tribunal cases in practice can be important too. 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
(see right) is £12 a quarter 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.
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.
- 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".
- Emplaw.co.uk/free/sampleindex.htm 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 bookshop 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 Amazon 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. If you
have a simple health and safety personal injury case, many of
the firms advertising on the right-hand column can help you.
They are firms which advertise on Yahoo Search Marketing, Miva,
or Adbrite and may be just up your street. Some are claims handling
agencies passing your case to a solcitor in your area for a share
of the takings. If you have the messiest case with the lowest
payout, firms advertising on the right can probably not help
even if you represent yourself and just ask them to sit-in to
advise and add the standard lawyer's fee to your claim if you
win. In between the two extremes, you have to decide how much
work to do yourself, and if there is a local firm advertising
in the right-hand column, how much to use them. Apart from firms
advertising on the right, there are other ways of find a no-win
no-fee employment solicitor close to the tribunal or close to
you.
- 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. Some cut costs by working
freelance at home ; others give a home address but work from
a high street 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. 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.
- CLSDirect.org.uk
includes the government's own database of employment law solicitors
who take legal aid and law centres listed by distance from your
post code, along with advice centres, general-purpose or specialised.
The site has an online calculator to work-out that you are not
eligible for legal aid because you have recently been employed,
and so can't use their helpline. In order to be on the
database, firms have to use a high proportion of staff on ordinary
wages, lower than the wages paid to qualified staff who may work
as supervisors.
- Waterlow
Legal | Public | Employment is a third Postcode-search of
employment law solicitors by firm. 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 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 live near
an employement 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. TakeLegalAdvice.com allows feedback
from customers who have posted short summery cases for lawyers
to bid on.
- 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. (Unions are exempt from this even
though T&G for exmple seems little more than a claims managment
agency). Legal firms that do not use law society members, such
as human resources consultants, are also listed. One that works
for the employee's side - Humane
Resources has appeared in the Employment Appeals Tribunal
(search for Melia). Employment solcitors claims management agencies
like GotTheBoot.com also advertise on the right-hand column of
this site and pay some of the server and domain costs. 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.
- 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 Precidents"
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. 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 (formerly Federation of Independent Avice Centres) and
the better-known of the two - Citizens
Advice Bureau. 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 genourous 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.
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