RESEARCH REPORT: ADJUDICATION IN THE EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL
| Volume 25 Number 3 | October 2000 |
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RESEARCH REPORT: ADJUDICATION IN THE EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL
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A database of Employment Tribunal adjudication decisions (and Employment Court judgments) has been under continuous construction at the Industrial Relations Research Centre of the Department of Management at the University of Otago since 1995. In recent years, the New Zealand Law Foundation has provided generous financial support to the project, allowing for the accelerated development of a more comprehensive database.
The database of employment decisions begins with the case summaries published by the Department of Labour’s Employment Institutions Information Centre and made available as a part of the Brooker’s 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 representation; characteristics of the Tribunal adjudicator, hearing and decision, including for example the gender of the adjudicator, location and length 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.
A number of academic and practitioner papers have issued from this project to date, including the first “facts and figures” report published in the corresponding issue of the New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations in 1999 (McAndrew, 1999). In that paper, relying on data for the years 1992 through 1997, I reported on the general profile of the Tribunal’s caseload and detailed outcomes for personal grievance cases, highlighting factors – including the nature of representation – that appeared to be associated in one manner or another with grievance outcomes.
The intent of this present report is to share some further, updated data on Tribunal decisions with the industrial relations and employment law community, illustrating the range of case issues being decisioned by the Tribunal, and highlighting some apparent trends and associations. The particular focus of this paper is the body of Tribunal adjudication decisions on personal grievance claims over dismissals for alleged misconduct. But first, the general profile.
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