Jewish woman wins tribunal claim

A Jewish woman called Aurelie Fhima has won an employment tribunal claim for indirect religious discrimination against a firm called Travel Jigsaw.  She applied for a job which required her to be flexible about her shift patterns, but she refused to work on Saturdays prior to dusk as she said that this would be against her religion.

Travel Jigsaw refused to make an exception for her, and declined to recruit her.   She then took her case to a tribunal, and The Telegraph online reports that:

Employment tribunal judges found in her favour – awarding almost £8,000 for loss of earnings, £7,500 for injury to feelings and £1,200 in fees.

(As an aside, the wording above is identical to the report of this case in another national newspaper.  Could the one be a copy and paste of the other?)

Employment tribunal claims place a considerable burden on employers, and I suspect that a lot of employers would happily see employment law abolished altogether, but that would risk creating even greater unfairness.

At the moment, employment law protects employees and job applicants from discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, belief, and race.  It also protects employees from unfair dismissal, but only after a qualifying period of employment, which is currently two years.

On the one hand I accept that employment law places a financial burden on British business, that the burden tends to manifest itself on a fairly random basis, and that small businesses are often poorly resourced to deal with tribunal claims.

On the other hand, I do not want to return to a time when employers could legally discriminate against people on a whim.  Take sex discrimination.  Why should any employer decide that a managerial position is for men only?  Or that a secretarial post is for women only?  So far as I am aware, sex discrimination in the workplace was commonplace when it was legal, and I know for a fact that age discrimination in the workplace was commonplace when it was legal.

I fail to understand, however, why a successful claimant should be entitled to large payouts, especially when some successful claimants receive quite small payouts.

Travel Jigsaw is free to lobby the government for a change in the law, but the company's directors should reflect that there would be less scope for employment tribunal claims on the grounds of race or belief if successive governments in this country had not adopted an open borders policy over the last sixty to seventy years.

They should reflect also that there would perhaps be far fewer tribunal claims if Britain had full employment.  After all, if Aurelie Fhima had secured a Monday to Friday job on the day before Travel Jigsaw advertised their call centre vacancies then she would presumably have never applied for a job with them.