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Unite the Union Transport and General
Workers section: Trade Union collapse

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#0. introduction

#1. which employment laws?

#2. telephone employment law

#3. look up employment law

#4. employment law solicitors

DIY Employment Law for sacked employees

#0. introduction

#1. find which employment laws apply to you with interactive online claim-checkers like Andrea Adams Trust

#2. check your employment law ideas by phone with employment law help lines like ACAS's. (08457 47 47 47 weekdays 8-6)

#3. check the basic position in law, and the text of laws or cases on Emplaw and Bailii

#4. find an employment law solicitor at this stage, or claim yourself.

#5. to register interest in a legal insurance scheme add your email address below

The idea is to learn the minimum possible law in the shortest possible time to sue within tight time limits.
This one-page guide is in the style of the MoneysavingExpert.com/Reclaim's guides to getting consumer revenge, written by someone who failed.

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.





listed on- Qxiu.net



#0 DIY Employment Law introduction: imagine you have a disaster at work.

  • 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.

#1 To find which employment laws apply to you:

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.

#2 To check your employment law ideas by phone:

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".

#3 To check the basic position in law, and then the text of the laws or cases:

  • 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

#4 To find an employment law solicitor who works no-win no-fee near your tribunal's post code:

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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http://www.employees.org.uk#1 - find which UK employment laws apply to you
http://www.employees.org.uk#2 - check your employment law ideas by phone
http://www.employees.org.uk#3 - check the basic position in law, and the full text of laws or cases
http://www.employees.org.uk#4 - find a solicitor at this stage or claim yourself


#5 to register interest in a legal insurance scheme add your email address below


Aardvark Mailing List keep these email addresses secure till there are enough of them to suggest a new legal insurance scheme, given that trades unions aren't doing this.
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