Monthly Archive for March, 2010

Update on an Employment Law Update

Employment law moves more quickly than any other legal area I know. Last week I presented three separate employment law updates and by the end of the week one of the cases I mentioned had been overturned by the Court of Appeal.

The case is Sarkar v West London Mental Health NHS Trust and if you were on one of the courses you may remember that that was the case where the employer originally dealt with bullying allegations by invoking their informal ‘fair blame procedure’ but then decided that following further allegations and the employee refusing to accept the outcome of the  procedure they moved to the formal procedure and dismissed him. The EAT reversed the tribunal’s finding of unfair dismissal and held that the employer was entitled to act in the way that it did.

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Trade unions funding the labour party

The trade union Unite has been in the news over the last few days in the context of the forthcoming strike at British Airways which has in turn led to a lot of noise being made about the way in which the union funds the Labour party.

While slightly off my usual beaten track of employment law, the rules governing union funds were something I wrote about quite a lot when I was a writer on IDS Brief and so I thought it might be worth summarizing the rules on political donations from trade unions. It turns out that union funding is about the most well regulated and democratic kind of political donation you could wish for.

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