A complaint about your own working conditions should not be thrown out early as incapable of being in the public interest.
“A complaint about your own working conditions should not be struck out early as incapable of being in the public interest; that question usually needs the full evidence.”
A complaint about your own working conditions should not be struck out early as incapable of being in the public interest; that question usually needs the full evidence.
- Write down why you believe your concern matters beyond yourself, such as a wider safety risk or the nature of the organisation.
- Keep copies of the emails and messages in which you raised the issue.
- If you are told your claim has no prospect and should be struck out, know that the bar for that is high.
The situation
A workerA legal category that sits between employee and self-employed. Workers are entitled to certain rights including national minimum wage, paid holiday, and protection from unlawful deduction from wages, ... at a large charity raised complaints, by conversation and by email, about her cramped desk and seating. She said the lack of space was aggravating a knee injury, so the concern had a clear health and safety dimension. She later resigned and brought claims including constructive dismissalWhen your employer's behaviour is so serious that you feel you have no choice but to resign, the law may treat that resignation as a dismissal. The most common basis is a fundamental breach of the imp... and detrimentAny action your employer takes that puts you at a disadvantage, short of dismissal. In a whistleblowing or discrimination context, being moved to a worse role, excluded from meetings, or given an unfa... on the basis that she had made protected disclosures. Her position was that the disclosures served the public interest, because the organisation was a publicly funded charity and the public had a stake in how it treated its staff.
What the tribunal found
An employment tribunalAn independent court that hears disputes between employees and employers. It is free to bring a claim as a claimant, and most hearings take place in public. struck out the whistleblowingMaking a disclosure about wrongdoing in your workplace, such as a health and safety risk, a criminal act, or a miscarriage of justice. If the disclosure qualifies as protected, the law gives you signi... part of the claim before any evidence was heard, deciding she had no real prospect of showing she reasonably believed a complaint about her own cramped conditions was in the public interest. The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that this was wrong. The threshold for striking out a claim without hearing the evidence is high. Whether she reasonably believed her disclosure was in the public interest was a question the tribunal could fairly resolve only once it had heard the full evidence at a hearing. The tribunal had set the bar too high at the strike-out stage, and the claim was allowed to proceed.
Morgan v Royal Mencap Society | UKEAT/0272/15/LA; [2016] IRLR 428 | Employment Appeal Tribunal | 22 January 2016