Employment law stories in the news – 14.11.2016 to 20.11.2016

redmans-blog-newsIn the latest of our series of posts on employment law stories in the news, we take a look at ten employment law stories that have made the news between 14 November and 20 November 2016

  1. Gay cake case may be heading for UK supreme court – Northern Ireland’s attorney general has applied for leave to appeal to the supreme court in London to review a ruling which found a Belfast bakery guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a pro-gay marriage cake (The Guardian)
  2. Council fined £250,000 for not protecting workers health – Thanet District Council has been fined after a worker was left with permanent injured after being diagnosed with hard arm vibration (HAV). Canterbury Crown Court heard how a worker from Thanet District Council was diagnosed with suffering from HAV after visiting his GP. Symptoms of the condition can include tingling, pins and needles, numbness and pain in the hands (HSE)
  3. Online database for employment tribunal judgments confirmed – HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) has confirmed that new employment tribunal decisions will be made publicly available online from late 2016 or early 2017. The database will allow the public to search for first-instance judgments from England, Wales and Scotland using drop-down menus and a free-text search (Personnel Today)
  4. Cancer patient given just 48 hours to live cruelly sacked after winning battle with lymphoma – A father who defied the odds and won his battle with cancer after doctors told him he had just hours to live was cruelly sacked after he reported back to work. Terry Foster, 58, was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2007, while his wife, Melanie, was pregnant with their first child (The Mirror)
  5. Teaching assistant sacked for objecting to 9/11 footage rejects compensation – A teaching assistant who was sacked for objecting to young children being shown graphic footage of the 9/11 attacks has turned down a compensation offer from the school and has vowed to fight the case in court (The Guardian)
  6. Fraud Office bid to gag Barclays banker tribunal – The Serious Fraud Office has launched a legal action to prevent a former top Barclays banker from publicly discussing his role in the bank’s contentious Qatari fundraising at the height of the financial crisis (The Times)
  7. More than 7m Britons now in precarious employment – The number of workers in the UK in precarious positions where they could lose their jobs at short or no notice has grown by almost 2 million in the past decade, as businesses insist on using more self-employed workers and increasingly recruit staff on temporary and zero-hours contracts, analysis for the Guardian has revealed (The Guardian)
  8. Company fined after workers fall into pulping machine – A maintenance company has appeared in court after a worker suffered serious injuries after falling 7 metres. The worker, suffered fractures to his left foot in the incident on the 9 July 2014 (HSE)
  9. Judges’ pensions battle reaches open court – An  employment tribunal hearing in London will today begin hearing age, sex and race discrimination claims brought by six High Court judges over their pension arrangements. They are among 193 judges challenging the reformed pension scheme (The Law Society Gazette)
  10. Prison officers end protest after court order – Prison officers have returned to work after a High Court injunction ordered them to end a 24-hour protest. Up to 10,000 prison officers in England and Wales stopped work over claims of a “surge in violence” in jails (BBC)