‘Bad play’

Employers are firing their employees too quickly without due process and in flagrant violation of the law, later leading to them having to pay compensation needlessly, according to the chairman of the Employment Rights Tribunal (ERT), retired Appeals Court Justice Christopher Blackman, QC.

He called on employers to comply with the guidelines set out by the Employment Rights Act in order to avoid such payouts.

Justice Christopher Blackman, QC (standing) addressing today’s seminar.

In a featured speech this afternoon at a Barbados Employment Confederation (BEC) seminar – Lessons from the Tribunal – Blackman said he was concerned by the pattern.

“The Employment Rights Tribunal is largely concerned with the process and the act speaks that an employer has the right not to be unfair to employees…. It speaks to fairness.

The audience at the Barbados Employment Confederation seminar.

“Largely speaking, employers sometimes act on will, and as a consequence, they have to pay for it.”

He further contended that in too many instances, employers were firing staff as a first option.

This was happening, said the retired appellate judge, even when those workers had been employed for decades.

Blackman suggested that employers terminate the services of their employees only if they committed acts which merited immediate dismissal, or once all of the proper procedures had been followed.

He noted: “One observation I have made is that it seems to me that the resort to dismissal is too often the first call rather than considering the whole other graph of measures that you can take or should take.

“At the end of the day, there seems to be a total disregard of the provisions of the Act.”

He made reference to a case which had been recently ruled on by the tribunal involving First Citizens Bank and Debra Brathwaite, the bank’s former Acting Senior Settlement Officer.

In September, the ERT awarded damages of $303,570.29 to Brathwaite after it ruled she had been unfairly dismissed by the bank in 2016.

Blackman said it was bewildering what led First Citizens to fire Brathwaite – an employee of over two decades – for a first-time offence.

He said: “What was striking with Brathwaite was that someone who had relatively blameless employment for over 20 years, was at the first blush of something which was in all and my view an innocent misunderstanding, dismissed.

“And what compounds that behaviour is that on the day of the dismissal, the bank then posted on its system something related to what she had done.

“So prior to that, they had been no flag that what had happened was something which shouldn’t be done.”

But the tribunal chairman said while some saw the ERT as “being against employers”, this was simply not true.

He acknowledged that while the majority of publicized cases had gone in favour of employees, he said this was because rules were not followed.

Blackman declared: “Employers feel that because there is a new sheriff in town at the ERT, there is a programme against employers that was imminent and prevailing.

“But first of all, I want to say to you that the ERT has no animus to any employer. We deal with the cases as we get them,”
randybennett@barbadostoday.bb