Wage differentials explained: Consult employees?

3 Comments

1. 

   GilesFiles on August 20, 2015 at 11:02 am

   Comment by Prof Darcy du Toit in latest 2015 August IR Network editorial: “Incompatibility” and diversity of opinion or belief: A thin dividing line? published online by LexisNexis [subscription required]

   “Incompatibility”, then, could encompass situations where the employer’s beliefs are at odds with an employee’s beliefs. This goes much further than issues of legal compliance. Cases of this nature have yet to reach the courts, but are not unknown in practice. For example, workplaces with a particular corporate culture may be uncomfortable for employees with different values and may breed friction between such employees and their colleagues. This could potentially create situations where the non-conformist employee comes to be regarded as a “problem” and, by extension, to be “incompatible” with the employer’s requirements.

   Incompatibility has been defined as “a species of incapacity” relating to “the subjective relationship of an employee and other co-workers, within the employment environment, regarding the employee’s inability to maintain cordial and harmonious relationships with his peers”. 4 To prove it, thus, it is not enough for the employer to show that the employee did not “fit in”; it must be shown that the employee was in some way responsible for the conflict of values. This opens the way to some scrutiny of the employment environment and the justifiability of the behaviour expected of the employee.

   This has parallels with disciplinary codes which, likewise, are in practice determined by the employer (even though, in law, the contractual relationship between employer and employee places limits on the extent to which an employer is entitled to do so). But it seems obvious that an employer’s power to prescribe “relationships” beyond the scope of disciplinary codes, let alone overrule employees’ “beliefs”, must be even more limited.

2. 

   GilesFiles on January 11, 2016 at 11:24 am

   Now reported: [2015] 12 BLLR 1213 (LC)
   Headnote:
   Dismissal – Automatically unfair – Protected disclosure – Employee claiming that employer flouted provisions of labour acts without laying factual basis for claim or proving that she reasonably believed allegation – Dismissal not automatically unfair