In Asda Stores Limited v Brierley, the question before the Court of Appeal was whether or not thousands of women who worked at Asda’s retail stores could compare themselves with male members of staff who worked at the company’s distribution depots for the purposes of their equal pay claim. The depot workers, who unlike their retail colleagues had the benefit of established union representation and collective bargaining agreements, were paid a higher salary. Continue reading →

Employers are reminded of the new National Living Wage (NLW) and National Minimum Wage (NMW) rates that will apply with effect from 1 April 2019: Continue reading →

A great many sporting and other clubs rely on volunteers to make ends meet. As one case showed, however, a failure to formalise such relationships in writing can lead to uncertainty and the evaporation of goodwill (Quinn v The Galley (Seaford) Limited). Continue reading →

Once an employee succeeds in establishing facts that arguably support a finding of discrimination, the burden of proving that there was no such discrimination falls upon the employer. The Court of Appeal has confirmed that approach in a guideline decision (Efobi v Royal Mail Group Limited). Continue reading →

The trouble with email addresses is that a single missing or misplaced character, even a dot, renders them entirely useless. The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) confronted the consequences of one such error in a guideline decision (Galloway v Wood Group UK Limited). Continue reading →

The Supreme Court has ruled that the way in which a university employee’s ill-health early retirement pension was calculated, based on the part-time salary he earned in the last three years before he took early retirement, did not constitute ‘unfavourable treatment’ for the purposes of Section 15(1) of the Equality Act 2010 (Williams v The Trustees of Swansea University Pension and Assurance Scheme and Another). Continue reading →

The law regulating what information a person must reveal concerning his or her criminal record when seeking employment attempts to strike a balance between guarding against the risk of harm caused if someone were to reoffend and allowing someone to get their life back on track by giving them an opportunity for rehabilitation. Continue reading →

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled in two further cases on the treatment of workers’ untaken paid annual leave (Stadt Wuppertal v Maria Elisabeth Bauer and Volker Willmeroth v Martina Broßonn). Continue reading →

The Court of Appeal has upheld the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) that drivers who use online taxi company Uber’s app are ‘workers’ within the meaning of the Employment Rights Act 1996 (ERA), rather than self-employed contractors, and thus have the right to be paid the National Minimum Wage or the National Living Wage and to receive holiday pay. However, the Court has given the company permission to appeal to the Supreme Court (Uber BV and Others v Aslam and Others). Continue reading →