- 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. The company
may pay no insurance premium tax on your subscription. 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 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 and so the opportunities for exploiting
sacked members are greater.
- 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. 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", 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".
http://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 the 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 and the problem is
greater in the pubic funded sector than the private funded sector.
Machiavellis play full time, like hardened criminals committing
crimes and with similar consequences for their victims. When
they are so used to it that they leave cocky clues, the clues
need time and care to interpret in context - criminals' clues
or managers' clues. The tribunal system was never set-up with
a police force and juries and a Crown Prosecution Service to
handle all 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 by some people of
Wolverhampton) take even less account of the complexity of a
case where an employer deliberately tries to conceal their actions
and motives and works for months or years with the idea of confusing
a tribunal in mind.
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 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
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. 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.
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 inreasonably 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 claimaint 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 Scotlans.
One lawyer working for Thompsons, the largest chain of laywers
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.
The Blair government and it's focus groups and gleaners of
Daily Mail headlines has also made Harassment a crinimal 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 harassement 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 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 [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?"
Compendi? 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. If the offense was something like  Anthoney
Gubbey's attempt to make the best compromise of being chief
justice in Zimbabwe, which was eventually met by yobs at the
court gate thretening to punch-in the windows because he was
the servant and Mugabe was the master, then you might think that
six months is not long enough for Mugabe and that Anthoney Gubbey
did a good job posponing 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 Anthoney 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 harrassment 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 Anoney 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 someon who like Anthoney 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 subordionates
sacked for it by the personell department or the other man who
resisted Robert Mogabe for years - 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,
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 borowing, and that the issue is an unfair
end to the relationsip 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 arguement 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 e will have to work it out together with this
"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.
 ttp://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 few pence dividend each year.
Unlike the free half-hour that some lawyers offer, the phone
line isn't given on the understanding that you'll use their no-win
no-fee employment lawyer if you have a good case. They probably
fund the phone line this way, but it's presented as a cheap-to-offer
membership perk. A downside of being cheap to the organisation
that lends its brand is that the lawyers are not specialists
in employment law and can't see paperwork. 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. In
newspaper interviews they have claimed to be willing to dictate
letters about small claims, but they won't read faxed documents
or 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.
- 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.
Council-run reference libraries tend to include one per council
with a collection of law books and some popular or slightly out
of date ones 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. 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.
solicitors-online.com lists individual lawyer and so is better
at finding lower-cost freelancers than the lawyers who work in
offices. Many of them work for Keystone
Law (formerly Lawyers Direct) which only counts as one firm
with two addresses in the directories below; others may possibly
be members of the Employment
Lawyers Association.
- 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 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 chanelled 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 as well
as 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 postcode. 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 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
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