A male employee challenged the special treatment given to a colleague during a redundancy selection and argued that his employer had acted ‘disproportionately’. He claimed that during the firm’s consultation he had been treated less fairly than his female colleague, who was given full marks on certain performance criteria despite being on maternity leave during the consultation period.
This week the Employment Appeal Tribunal agreed with his argument and you can find more case details at The Lawyer.
If employers have to reduce employee numbers and there are at least two employees in the pool, one female on maternity leave and a male colleague, then this case may suggest that employers use proportionate scoring methods rather than awarding the female employee top marks as a knee jerk reaction. More will be revealed as commentaries emerge in coming weeks.
Quite the opposite was happening in this case of redundancy selection for reasons of maternity where bosses decided a woman with young children wouldn’t be able to ‘put in the hours’ required by the job!
Employment Law Essentials UK 