{"id":1191,"date":"2024-11-09T21:03:31","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T21:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2024-11-09T21:21:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T21:21:24","slug":"david-v-goliath-at-the-employment-tribunals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/?p=1191","title":{"rendered":"David v Goliath at the Employment Tribunals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The 21 Group is indebted to Dr Emily Baker for contributing a new section to the 21 Group webpages on Employment Tribunals for Beginners<\/a>. This is the definitive “HowTo” on holding your University to account in the Employment Tribunals if they are guilty of discrimination, unfair or constructive dismissal, wage theft or failure to protect a whistleblower. There is a host of practical advice in the article to those who may want to fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dr Emily Baker puts it, “Higher education institutions leverage a uniquely powerful position in the careers of their employees. They are gold-plated institutions that attract gold-plated individuals. In any event, individuals who work at those institutions are gold by association. On commencing their employment, they have access to jobs, grants, resources and skilled labour they would not otherwise. Such jobs, grants, resources and skilled labour are the essence of career progression in academia. Institutions are clearly wise to this and they can name their price accordingly, or so the insidious mentality goes. The institution can foster certain practices employees should be expected to just put up with because to work there at all is considered a privilege. If you don\u2019t like it, well, many will flock in their droves to take your place<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An employee versus a University is a David versus Goliath fight. Universities are wealthy. Supply of academics hopelessly outstrips demand in the job market. Rampant casualisation means fewer & fewer people have secure academic jobs. So universities start off in a strong position in employment disputes. They are Goliath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, there have been a string of University losses at Employment Tribunals over the last couple of years. David has regularly beaten Goliath — for example, in McCambridge v York University (2023), Miller v Bristol University (2023), Jolly & Abrams v Oxford University (2023), Phoenix v Open University (2023), Abrahart v Bristol University (2023), Harvie, Lightfoot & Lilley v Leicester University (2024), D’Arcy v Leicester University (2024) and Leaney versus Loughborough University (2024). Employment Tribunal decisions can be searched for and examined on the HM Courts website here<\/a>. In fact, claimants against Universities statistically have an excellent chance of winning, as shown by the infographic at the top of the article. (We particularly note & applaud the resilience of Dr D’Arcy who represented herself and defeated Leicester University’s highly paid KC, winning substantial damages for unfair dismissal).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if you lose, as in Connolly v Cambridge University, it still provides an opportunity to put your case to a wider audience (see the Daily Telegraph<\/a> and our blog posting<\/a>). The supervisor who plagiarised Dr Connolly while she was a PhD student was named in the press. Cambridge University won this case, as the Tribunal concluded that the University had done nothing wrong legally. However, it is clear that the University behaved very badly towards an early career researcher from an ethical standpoint. Cambridge University’s Human Resources department embroiled her in a 4 year grievance procedure before concluding that Dr Connolly had been correct all along.They took no action against the supervisor (Dr Connolly was represented on a no win-no fee basis at the Tribunal by a generous lawyer).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 21 Group believes that the mistreatment of employees in the higher education sector is widespread. Absolutely nothing will improve unless the individuals who are wronged fight back. So we are in favour of more academics taking universities to Employment Tribunals, if there is a good case & internal methods of redress fail (they usually do in universities). So, we hope Dr Emily Baker’s article inspires more people to hold to account those who run our universities and preside over the casual and common mistreatment of staff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 21 Group is indebted to Dr Emily Baker for contributing a new section to the 21 Group webpages on Employment Tribunals for Beginners. This is the definitive “HowTo” on holding your University to account in the Employment Tribunals if they are guilty of discrimination, unfair or constructive dismissal, wage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1191"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1204,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1191\/revisions\/1204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/21percent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}