Lapsed warning, redundancy, EU Industrial action
The last month has seen two Court of Appeal decisions on very basic issues of employment law that have been eagerly awaited. The first concerns the hot topic of the employment status (or, more appropriately, lack thereof) of a long-serving agency-supplied worker and the second concerns the status of an expired warning—can it be used for any purpose at all? Ironically, the third case considered here also addresses a nose-to-the grindstone issue for practical employment, but one on which there has been almost no reported case law, namely the legality of the common technique of effecting redundancies by sacking all the relevant staff and making them reapply for the jobs that are left.
Finally (possibly taking our cue from Oscar Wilde’s remark that we are all in the gutter but some of us look up at the stars) we raise our gaze from the squalor of domestic detail to the wonders and sunny uplands of EC Law and see a recent European Court