A recent UK employment tribunal decision highlights the importance of valuing both education and skills and of communicating clearly with employees when making employment decisions.
In the case of Norman v Lidl Great Britain Ltd, a man in his sixties, who was a senior construction consultant for Lidl, was responsible for overseeing the construction, alteration and refurbishment of regional stores.
Following a reduction in new store openings and redevelopments, Wayne Norman was placed into a pool of three senior construction consultants as part of a redundancy process because only one role was available under Lidl’s new structure.
The company used a scoring exercise to determine which employees would be selected for redundancy, based on experience, knowledge, skills, disciplinary record work delivery and managing workload. The knowledge criteria were partially scored on whether the employee had a construction degree, which Mr Norman didn’t. He scored only one point less than his colleague in his 30s, who had a college degree and secured the position.
Mr Norman did not apply for any alternative employment as he believed there was a requirement to have a degree to be eligible for any of the available vacancies. He raised an employment tribunal claim against Lidl for indirect age discrimination, alongside several other claims.
The indirect age discrimination part of his claim was successful, based on the tribunal’s acceptance of the premise that workers over the age of 60 are...
Campbell’s, a renowned canned soup brand, recently terminated a high-ranking executive following the emergence of a recording in which he made racially insensitive statements and alleged that the ...