If a group of you refuse to work over a safety concern, your employer still has to look at your reasons individually.
“EATStands for Employment Appeal Tribunal. It hears appeals from employment tribunal decisions on points of law, not on the facts. It is not a way of simply asking for a second opinion on the outcome.: tribunal wrongly grouped claimants together; case remitted for individual assessment.”
If you refuse to work because you believe there's a serious and imminent dangerSerious and imminent danger is the legal threshold in section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. If you reasonably believed you or others faced this level of risk, your employer can't penalise you ..., what matters is what you personally knew and believed. Not what happened to a colleague doing the same thing.
- Get this in writing while it's fresh: what you were told, what you personally saw or heard, and why you believed the danger was real.
- One of several people raising the same safety concern? Give your own individual account rather than relying on a shared group statement.
- Get advice early if your employer penalises you for a safety-based refusal to work. These cases turn on detailed factual findings that are much easier to establish while they're fresh.
The situation
A group of prison officers refused to drive prison transport onto a road that had been closed by the police and the Highways Authority after snowfall. Radio reports at the time described multiple accidents on the closed road, including jack-knifed lorries and two prison vehicles that had already nearly left the road themselves. Their employer withheld a day's pay from all of them for refusing to travel.
What the tribunal found
The original tribunal dismissed their claims. It treated the group as a single unit rather than looking at what each officer had individually been told and believed at the time. On appeal, the Employment Appeal Tribunal found that reasoning was inadequate. It had wrongly credited the wrong person with a key decision. It said it would assess each claimant separately, then didn't. And it reasoned that because some colleagues finished the same drive without incident, none of the claimants could reasonably have believed they were in danger, without ever finding what those specific claimants actually knew.
A different judge will now rehear the case from scratch.
This is the section 44 test for a serious and imminent danger.
Mr S Edwards and Others v The Secretary of State for Justice. UKEAT/0123/14/DM. Employment Appeal Tribunal. 24 July 2014.