Thu, 3 Jun 2010

Male worker wins bias case

A man has won a claim of sex discrimination in a case where his employer dismissed him instead of a pregnant colleague – ironically for fear of a tribunal case. To deepen the irony, the case was at the Leeds office of leading law firm Eversheds.

John de Belin won £123,000 in damages after successfully claiming discrimination following the firm’s decision to make him redundant. Chris Syder, head of employment at law firm Davies Arnold Cooper, told Personnel Today that it was a ‘fascinating case’. He said that following the ruling, many employers will have to review their redundancy criteria.

Mr De Belin and his pregnant colleague, Angela Reinholz, both faced redundancy from Eversheds’ property division in Leeds. Eversheds’ redundancy programme was based on a points system judged against certain criteria.

The law firm undertook an assessment of the capabilities of both employees, including commercial performance, discipline history and absence records. After losing by half a point, Mr De Belin was made redundant in February 2009, but he claimed that the test score had been ‘unfairly inflated’ to the advantage of his female colleague.

In the judgment, Judge Jeremy Shulman said: ‘We do not find that the Sex Discrimination Act was intended to protect a woman on maternity leave in a redundancy-scoring exercise, where we find that she received an unfairly inflated score when all other scores were actual, the notional score being designed to defeat a tribunal case by Ms Reinholz.’

Eversheds has appealed. It will claim that Mr De Belin would have been treated in the same way if he were a woman, meaning he could not be subject to sexual discrimination.