Employment law stories in the news – 15.03.2021 to 21.03.2021

In the latest of our series of posts on employment law stories in the news we take a look at ten employment law-related stories that made headlines between 15 March 2021 and 21 March 2021

  1. Woman seeks £3.3m in discrimination case after male colleagues left witch’s hat on desk – A banker who won a sex discrimination case after drunken male colleagues left a witch’s hat on her desk is seeking £3.3million in stigma losses. Stacey Macken sued French bank BNP Paribas for £4million after claiming she was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds less than men over four year (Daily Star)
  2. Up to 1,500 former Thomas Cook employees win payouts – An employment tribunal has ruled that package holiday company Thomas Cook failed to consult before making redundancies when it went into administration in September 2019. This could allow about 1,500 former Thomas Cook staff to claim up to £4,200 each from the government’s Insolvency Service (Personnel Today)
  3. Uber to introduce holiday pay and pensions for UK drivers after Supreme Court defeat – Uber has agreed to give its UK drivers holiday pay and pensions after a landmark Supreme Court ruling. The ride-hailing app will give workers’ rights to more than 70,000 drivers from Wednesday after losing its case at the UK’s top court last month (The Independent)
  4. Woman, 65, wins £109,000 after returning from holiday to find ‘young lady’ doing job – An embassy worker who was forced to retire because of her age returned from a fortnight’s holiday to find a younger replacement sitting at her desk. Janice Dinsdale, a former clerk at the Indian embassy, returned to work a day after her 65th birthday (The Mirror)
  5. Mike Hill: Labour Party accused of failing tribunal claimant – Labour failed to support the claimant in an employment tribunal being brought against the party’s former MP for Hartlepool, a QC has said. Mike Hill, 57, who resigned on Tuesday, will face claims of sexual harassment and victimisation – which he denies – at the hearing in May (BBC)
  6. Paralegal told she is ‘not a princess’ loses harassment claim – A paralegal who accused her firm of harassment after being told she was ‘not a princess’ and ‘didn’t know her alphabet’ has seen all her claims dismissed by the employment tribunal (The Law Society Gazette)
  7. Female police officer subject to diet comments wins tribunal claim – A police officer has won a claim for harassment after her boss said she might feel better if she stopped drinking ‘gallons of Coke’. Detective constable Kerry Moth was afflicted by illnesses including visceral hyperalgesia (regional pain syndrome), depression and, later, fibromyalgia. She was overweight because of the medication needed to lessen her symptoms, an employment tribunal in Exeter heard (Personnel Today)
  8. Worker Cheryl Young secures £30,000 payout after being dismissed by HMRC because she was pregnant – HM Revenue & Customs has been ordered to pay out almost £30,000 after sacking a woman because she was pregnant. Cheryl Young, a former admin assistant at the government body’s Lanarkshire contact centre, was dismissed in April 2019 – just weeks after telling bosses she was expecting (Herald Scotland)
  9. Oxford academic loses legal battle over being sent on ‘humiliating’ anti-harassment training – An Oxford academic has lost a legal battle against the university after he was made to take “humiliating” anti-harassment training over a “clumsy” attempt to kiss a female colleague (The Telegraph)
  10. Former Pimlico Plumbers worker not entitled to holiday pay – An engineer who claimed he was owed holiday pay by Pimlico Plumbers, after the Supreme Court ruled that he was a worker and not self-employed, has been unsuccessful in his latest claim for backdated payments (Personnel Today)