In its judgement in Zabelin -v- SPI Spirits and Shefler this month, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has offered a refresher course on some important questions around protected disclosures, contracting out of statutory rights and when the Acas Code applies.
The background facts are relatively simple. Zabelin worked for SPI which is owned by Mr Shefler. Like many other employers, SPI agreed a temporary pay cut with its employees in 2020 to mitigate the adverse impact of the pandemic. Like rather fewer of them, it then unilaterally extended that cut beyond the date agreed, provoking Zabelin into complaining about that breach of contract as it applied to him and others, a complaint reinforced by SPI’s simultaneous proposal to change his 2019 bonus provision retrospectively from something he had a reasonable chance of obtaining to something he didn’t. Zabelin said that this too was a breach of his contract and those of other staff, that this approach was causing great unease and damage to mental health among other SPI teams and offices, and that the whole exercise was being conducted without transparency or financial necessity, but simply to increase SPI’s profit. What must have been a less than amicable call between him and Shefler about all this ended abruptly when Zabelin was told that he really needn’t worry about any of it because he was fired.
The original Employment Tribunal concluded that even though Zabelin’s complaints were clearly motivated substantially by his own...
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