Congratulations!
by Philip
Congratulations go out to Laurie Hibbs who I have just heard has become HR Director at Fosters Group (the lager people) based in Australia. Well done Laurie, enjoy the sunshine and the teasing about the cricket.
There were some interesting comments on yesterday’s post relating to third party abuse. The comments made me reminisce about a case I conducted before Mr Bellis (remember him!) at Nottingham ET back in 1995. I was acting for two respondents A Ltd and AB Ltd, both Companies operated from one site who were in common ownership. The facts were that an employee of A limited was alleging that an employee of AB Limited was sexually harassing her. During the case I made a submission that A Limited could not be held vicariously liable for the actions of an employee of AB Limited. Although the term associated employer is defined at sections 82 (1) and (2) of the SDA there is no other reference to the term in the Act. To be strictly accurate the reference to associated employer at section 82 was a hangover from when the SDA did not apply to employers employing fewer than 5 employees. Anyway after all of 5 minutes consideration of the submission the Tribunal returned and we were told that “we weren’t getting through that loophole.” Luckily, in any event, the Tribunal found on the facts that there was no harassment. But if McDonald is rightly decided then A Limited would be going through that loophole to avoid liability.
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