Employment Law Bulletin - September 2021

Welcome to the Wrigleys Employment Law Bulletin, September 2021.

The success of the UK vaccination programme has led to some new questions for employers, but the answer to these is largely based on long-standing employment law principles. We hope you can join us for our next free Employment Brunch Briefing on 5 October which considers whether employers can make decisions about their staff based on vaccination status. Please see the Events page on our website or click the link below for more detail.

In our first article this month we consider whether staff have the right to take paid time off to have the Covid vaccination.

Employment tribunals continue to consider employment disputes which arose at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. We cover a recent judgment which considered whether a dismissal because of a refusal to go to the house of a self-isolating colleague was automatically unfair because it was on health and safety grounds. We also consider a tribunal judgment on whether a pregnant worker was discriminated against when she was not allowed in to work for health and safety reasons in the first months of the pandemic. Although they do not set a precedent, these judgments provide a useful insight into how tribunals will approach Covid-related decisions by employers.

The EAT judgment in Kong v Gulf International Bank (UK) Ltd provides helpful insight into the circumstances when the motivation of someone other than the dismissal decision maker will be attributed to the employer in whistleblowing claims. It is also helpful in showing how the tribunals should approach cases where the reason for dismissal was not the whistleblowing concerns themselves but the employee's poor communication skills in raising them.

We are always interested in feedback or suggestions for topics that may be of interest to you, so please do get in touch

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