Employment Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Employment Law - Essay Example Based on the reported facts, at the onset before Tanya was actually hired by your company, she already concealed a material information prior to her employment, which was her medical condition as she suffered from Trigeminal Neuralgia. Her present medical condition constrained her to report to daily to work if she is suffering an attack. Clearly, your company is already experiencing losses due to her absences. The constant conflict between Brian and Tanya must be resolved by the employer. Brian’s act of falsely accusing Tanya as â€Å"useless† and not being capable of carrying out her job already constitutes as a form of harassment (Isle of Wight Tourist Board v Coombes [1976] IRLR 413). As the boss of both Brian and Tanya, you are expected to resolve the friction between the two employees and to stop any form of harassment and to make sure to avoid it from happening again in the future. On the issue of incompetency of Tanya, it was recently discovered that she committe d major blunders in the company while she was still an employee because the banking records are inaccurate and what’s worse is that she even misappropriated a sum of money since the petty cash fund is short by a ?100, which was under her custody while she was still an employee. This is a gross misconduct on her part and considered as stealing money from the company. I. ANALYSIS Under the law, a constructive dismissal case will only prosper if it satisfies the requirements provided under the law. The Employee Rights Act of 1996 of Section 95(c) provides that the employee terminates the contract under which he is employed with or without notice in circumstances in which he is entitled to terminate it without notice by reason of the employer’s conduct (Employee Rights Act: 1996). In these circumstances, the employer’s behaviour constitutes a repudiation of the contract and the employee accepts the repudiation by resigning (Lewis 2009, p.210). In the case at bar, Ta nya informed the employer that she is no longer reporting to work because of the verbal conduct of Brian against her. Here, it is not the employer’s conduct or behaviour which forced Tanya to resign, but was caused by Brian’s verbal abuse on her. In all fairness to you as the employer, you made reasonable efforts to prevent the harassment from happening again by telling Brian to stop the verbal abuse on Tanya. However, Brian was still not able to resist throwing invectives against Tanya in the workplace. The day after her last fight with Brian, she immediately filed the case without going through mediation. On the other hand, under the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997, a person must not pursue a conduct (a) which amounts to harassment of another and; (b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of another (Protection from Harassment Act: 1997). Clearly, Brian is guilty of verbally abusing Tanya every time he accuses her of incompetence in from of peo ple in the office (Cortaulds v Andrew [1979] IRLR 85 ). Thus, this instance will fall as harassment on the part of Brian. As a general rule, the employer is liable for the acts of its employees under the principle of vicarious liability. However, the employer can avoid liability for discriminatory harassment if they can prove that they took such steps that were reasonably practical to prevent harassment from occurring. Furthermore, individual employees may also be liable, for