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RESEARCH REPORT: ADJUDICATION IN THE EMPLOYMENT TRIBUNAL
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As noted above, case decision data for each of the three major bases of dismissal have shown a decline in grievant success rates. Table Seven demonstrates that this has been pretty consistently true throughout the life of the Employment Tribunal, again most dramatically in the case of dismissals for misconduct. While grievant wins have trended downward on a slightly rocky road over time in the cases of dismissals for poor performance and redundancy, wins by applicants grieving their dismissals for misconduct have dropped quite markedly in several dramatic steps, falling fully 30 percentage points over the period from 1992 through 1999.
Grievants enjoyed a high of some 77 percent success in grieving misconduct dismissals in the first full year of the Tribunal, 1992. In approximate figures, this dropped by about 10 percentage points to the mid-60s percent in 1993 – 1994, and then by about another five percentage points to 60 percent for the following two years, 1995 – 1996, and then another drop of about 10 percentage points to around 50 percent for the two years after that, 1997 – 1998, and finally another five percent drop to the mid-40s percent in 1999; more than 30 percentage points in seven years.
| Reason for Dismissal | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 |
| Dismissal: Misconduct | 64 77.1% |
78 66.1% |
96 65.8% |
65 60.2% |
68 60.7% |
45 51.1% |
50 50.5% |
45 44.6% |
| Dismissal: Poor Performance | 51 92.7% |
59 85.5% |
59 80.8% |
55 76.4% |
34 73.9% |
46 90.2% |
40 76.9% |
29 70.7% |
| Dismissal: Redundancy | 48 76.2% |
41 70.7% |
69 75.8% |
48 63.3% |
49 75.4% |
47 67.1% |
54 65.1% |
51 63.8% |
The decline in grievant success rates over time holds true for most, but not all, of the several sub-categories of the “misconduct” category in the database, and the fall is more dramatic in some sub-categories than in others. “Disobedience” offences have seen the most substantial decline in win rates for grievants, falling in a reasonably straight line from 76 percent success in 1992 to 50 percent in 1995 to 40 percent in 1997 to about 30 percent in 1998 and to slightly under 20 percent in 1999. At the other extreme, there have been some relatively minor variations year to year in success rates for applicants grieving dismissals for alleged theft offences, but no substantial change over the life of the Tribunal. Workers grieving their dismissals for theft had a success rate of 56 percent in Tribunal adjudications in 1992, a success rate of 54 percent in 1999, and an overall success rate for the period of 59 percent.
| Introduction | |
| The database of decisions | |
| The Tribunal's adjudication workload | |
| Grievance outcomes | |
| A closer look at dismissal decisions | |
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Focusing on misconduct dismissal decisions |
| Looking for explanations | |
| Concluding comment |
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