You cannot bring a case for discrimination if you are working illegally, The Court of Appeal has ruled. A claim for race discrimination was brought to the courts in vain after it was discovered the appellant in question didn’t merely acquiesce to the illegality of her employment, but was knowingly involved in it. This, the Court confirmed with steadfast resolve, was unacceptable.

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2,000 employees and 200 employers were surveyed as part of a ’working lives’ report conducted by the insurer Aviva. The survey reported that 68% of employees are unaware of the government’s plan to automatically enrol some of them onto their respective company’s pension schemes. ‘Auto-enrolment’ is due to take force from 1 October 2012. 

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The Supreme Court has ruled that an employer has the power to force an employee to retire where it is in the interests of “inter-generational fairness”; of particular significance was the Court’s acceptance of the occasional need for employers to forcibly retire employees in the interests of this concept. The case highlights the difficulties inherent in the effort to achieve  fairness across different age groups.

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Employment tribunals (ETs) were once seen as a glimmering beacon in a world where red-tape and dillydallying were prevalent. Paperwork, lawyers, forms and formalities were to be done away with in a radical new plan to liberate the English justice system, or part of it anyway, of its overly bureaucratic reputation. But time has been unkind to the well-meaning philosophy behind the ET. The decades since have seen amongst other things a bigger working population, the introduction of EU rules and, perhaps most devastatingly, a wider range of grounds on which to bring a claim.

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