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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For the past several years, a database of Employment Tribunal (and Employment Court) decisions has been under constant, but fairly slow, construction at the Industrial Relations Research Centre of the Department of Management at the University of Otago. The work of building the database received a very substantial boost this year from grants generously provided by the New Zealand Law Foundation and the Otago University Research Committee. That funding support has allowed accelerated construction of the database as well as the opportunity to examine the data for patterns and trends, and for gaps that need to be filled.
Our database of employment decisions begins with the case summaries published by the Department of Labour's Employment Institutions Information Centre and made available on CD-ROM as a part of the Brookers employment law package. Having extracted the data from those summaries, our research staff then examine the decisions themselves for data on additional variables. The variables captured for the database are in several categories: the issues involved in the case; characteristics of the parties, including gender, occupation, industry, and type of representation; characteristics of the Tribunal adjudicator, hearing and decision, including for example the gender of the adjudicator, location of the hearing, and length of the decision; and various measures of the outcomes of the cases - who won, who lost, and the nature of remedies awarded, if any.
The intent of this report is to share some of the data on Tribunal decisions with the industrial relations and employment law community in an introductory way, illustrating the range of case issues being decisioned by the Tribunal, and highlighting representation of the parties as one of a number of variables associated with Tribunal processes and outcomes.
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