You might even be able to have something generic like "verbal abuse" but then you have to be careful that it might be turned on the bosses and cause another type of lawsuit.
That’s why I don’t see these rulings as a win for the common employee. The situation now encourages companies to be as broad as possible with their contracts and policies and include so many just-in-case provisions that it starts to get hard for anyone to know and follow all of them.
No, they aren't because that's not how contracts or the law work in the UK. The court found that the contract enumerated a long list of breaches of contract, of which "swearing at colleagues" was not in that list. This means the court read the list as exhaustive, because it appeared to be exhaustive.
If the contract was worded differently, the court may not have used this interpretive rule. If the wording was a little more broad, the court may have worked to determine whether "swearing at your boss" could reasonably fit into the terms.
Yes, and that's why I said HR and Legal are updating their boilerplate to be more exhaustive.
I'm saying they're going to update the contracts to match the labor laws.
If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated, contracts will now have a lot of fireable offenses explicitly enumerated. That's not evading the law, that's literally how you comply with the law.
They don't, nor does this decision.
The company simply didn't follow the rules of the employment contract, which both parties had agreed to.
No they're not. This ruling makes no difference to the legal, employment or contractual landscape of the UK. Reading the ruling, it was resolved in exactly the way any competent HR lawyer would expect. The employer was bang out of order and was rightly slapped down by the court.
> If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated
No they don't. As others have pointed out: the ruling flags that the contract itself enumerates gross misconduct offences. Some of which include "excessive swearing" or "swearing at customers." Given the context of what the contract does enumerate, the court found that the contract does not consider this, obviously, lesser misconduct was out of scope of gross misconduct, as per the terms of the contract.
If the contract did not include such a specific list, but merely described a more broad category of things that are considered gross misconduct, then the court might have ruled differently.
If you want to fire someone you follow procedure. In this case they didn't follow procedure. This is exactly the sort of situation HR already despairs over.
Writing new HR documents can't fix this, the same way that bolding the text "Do not press this button" in the instruction manual will not stop customers who don't read the manual and then press the button from doing so.
This also just obviously isn't gross misconduct. So now your rewritten procedures might get you sued which (checks notes) is the opposite of what you wanted.
In this case, all they had to do was issue a warning - as they promosed to do in the contract - instead of a summary firing for the first offense. If the behavior reoccurred they'd have been clear.
We're literally reading an example of someone being protected by laws and your response is "well this is actually bad for them"?
have you read any of your company's policys recently?
at one company I could be technically fired for wearing a tracksuit to work.
at a FAANG, one that was very famous for upholding "freedom of expression", could fire me for questioning _in private_ the direction of anyone more senior than me.
Even if those policies are broad and all encompassing, you still need to demonstrate that they were applied correctly, proportionally and reasonably.
You also need to prove that the _policy_ is reasonable as well.
for example you _could_ have a policy where you cannot say anything negative. Good luck trying to prove that its legally reasonable (and that it was applied evenly)
That's just going to lead to a lawsuit on the definition of "verbal abuse".
> A quick update to the procedures that calling someone a dickhead is a fireable offense is all that is needed.
Even specifically stating that might not work. It is not uncommon for such clauses to be struck through in court if they are deemed unfair and disproportionally punitive to the employee.
For a regular office drone otherwise in good standing, given the UK's cultural context, getting fired for calling your boss a "dickhead" is an extremely harsh punishment. An official warning, improvement plan, or some kind of training would be more appropriate.
> However, this required she be given a prior warning. Only more serious breaches such as “threatening and intimidating language” would be gross misconduct and warrant summary dismissal.
It seems like the prior warning is the necessary part. The company obviously wants to write the rules such that the upper management team can make a one-off stupid comment to an employee without the employee suing to get them fired. Unfortunately, this means the upper management team can't rage-fire someone with no thought. (No doubt to show how in charge and powerful they are, which kind of proves the person using the term "dickhead" right.)
Nope, needs to be reasonable. If you're doing something unusual, then it needs to be telegraphed and backed up so that if you are taken to court you can give evidence as to why that clause was needed.
> have something generic like "verbal abuse"
you would need to have a policy that defines what verbal abuse is, and a way to record and catagorise it. its also a hard task to prove that one instance of verbal abuse where using "dickhead" as a term of endearment without any other connotations (sexual or otherwise) is gross misconduct, especially as the reply was "you can fuck off"
I think trying to fire someone based on that rather than addressing whatever conflict or friction lead to the “name calling” is an example of bad management.
Telling someone to fuck off could be verbal abuse, as fuck is a verb. But in this case it was not the purely figurative suggestion to fuck off was the britishism meaning to please leave with haste.
Saying "You're a dickhead" is verbal abuse. Saying "Dickhead" alone is nounal abuse.