An employer who knows about your excessive hours and does nothing can still be liable.
“The employer knew about the punishing hours, chose to do nothing, and was held liable for the stress injury that followed.”
It comes down to what the employer knew. If they could see the hours were doing you harm and let them carry on, the liability is theirs, whether or not you ever raised it and however willing you looked.
- Track the hours you are actually working week to week. What your contract says you should do is beside the point here; what you really did is what counts.
- Every time a manager clocks, mentions or is told about those hours, jot it down, even a passing corridor comment, since that is how you show they knew.
- If it has already cost you your health, ask about a personal injury claim as well as a tribunal claim. Different rules, different time limits, so do not lump them together.
The situation
A licensed pub manager was running the premises on 89 to 92 hours a week. As colleagues left or were moved elsewhere, nobody was brought in to cover the gap, so the load simply fell on him. His employer could see the hours he was putting in but did nothing to bring them down. In time he collapsed at work with chest pain and dizziness, and was found to have suffered a psychiatric injury brought on by the stress of those hours.
What the court found
The Court of Appeal upheld the finding that the employer was liable. The Working Time Regulations draw a firm line: unless you have signed an opt-out, your average week cannot lawfully be pushed past 48 hours, and that cap is there for one reason, to protect your health. Here the employer knew the manager was working far beyond it and made no move to pull the hours back. Once an employer knows that, the court said, injury of this kind becomes reasonably foreseeable. And the fact that the manager kept going without complaint changed nothing; his willingness to carry on did not shift the risk back onto him.
Hone v Six Continents Retail Ltd | [2005] EWCA Civ 922 | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) | 29 June 2005