RESEARCH REPORT: ADJUDICATION IN THE EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL
| Volume 24 Number 3 | October 1999 |
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RESEARCH REPORT: ADJUDICATION IN THE EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL
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Ian McAndrew is a senior lecturer in industrial relations at the University of Otago and a Member of the Employment Tribunal. The views expressed here are, however, his personal views only. He is grateful to the New Zealand Law Foundation for funding support for the research reported here, and to David Pannett and Stephen Bradley for legal research assistance.
Introduction
The New Zealand Employment Tribunal has been up and running for eight years now. In that time the Tribunal has received and processed many thousands of applications. Most have been resolved either through confidential mediation in the Tribunal or through direct bilateral dealings between the parties. Nonetheless, there has been a very substantial output of adjudication decisions by the Tribunal over the past eight years.
At the 1998 New Zealand Law Society Employment Law Conference, Christchurch barrister Tony Couch presented some valuable statistics and comments (Couch, 1998) drawn from his analysis of the database of Tribunal decisions produced by the Employment Institutions Information Centre. Other than Couch's paper, there has not been a lot of general analysis of the Tribunal's decisions. There have been some more focused analyses on gender issues (Morris, 1996; McAndrew, Dowling and Woodward, 1997-1998), and a number of papers on the functions and processes of the Tribunal by various Tribunal Members (Grills, 1992; Grills, 1993; Gardiner, 1993; McAndrew, 1995; Dumbleton, 1996), but little analysis of the Tribunal's general adjudication output.
Naturally enough, the Employment Court's decisions, and the employment law decisions of the Court of Appeal tend to attract more attention from both scholars and practitioners. Still, while the Courts define the law, most of the application is done through Employment Tribunal decisions, and it is important to examine the body of Tribunal adjudication decisions periodically. This paper begins to do that.
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