RESEARCH REPORT: DETERMINATIONS OF THE EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS AUTHORITY Volume 27  Number 3 October 2002   Introduction   The Authority and Tribunal caseloads   The personal grievance profile   Grievance outcomes   Determinations and remdies: looking for explanations   Factors associated with grievance outcomes   Grievance remedies   Reduction of remedies   Costs   Summary conclusions

Grievance outcomes

In the adjudication or determination of a personal grievance claim, there are sometimes many points of substance or procedure or even jurisdiction encompassed within the overall question of whether the employer's action in dismissing or disadvantaging (or not) an employee was justifiable in all the circumstances. A party can, then, "win" a grievance case without wholly winning the case.

Perhaps the most obvious example would be where the applicant employee is found to have been unjustifiably dismissed, but to have contributed to the situation in such a way and to such an extent that the remedies to the applicant are required to be reduced. So a "win" in a personal grievance claim is often a matter of degree rather than a matter of absolutes.

For the purposes of analysis here, a successful outcome for the employee - a "win" - consists of a finding by the Authority or the Tribunal that the employee has a personal grievance. With that definition, "no advantage to either party" outcomes are negligible in number in grievance cases and, so, are omitted from the rest of the analysis. Grievant success rates recorded below are presented as percentages of the total "win" and "lose" outcomes only.

Frequency tabulations essentially record history while statistical correlations record patterns in the historical relationships between variables. Neither are necessarily statistically significant or useful predictors of the future. But they are, nonetheless, interesting to observe. For example, Table Six shows the employee success rates for personal grievants by institution and registry for the 18 months sample periods.

As indicated earlier, in both the Tribunal and the Authority female Members issue about one-third of the decisions, as might be expected from the relative numbers of female and male Members. Earlier reports have seen gender surface occasionally as a factor seemingly associated, under some limited circumstances, with adjudication outcomes (see Morris, 1996; McAndrew, 2000; McAndrew, Dowling and Woodward, 1997-98). This has rarely been borne out at a statistically significant level.

Table Seven shows employee success rates by institution, and by adjudicator and applicant gender. There are some differences by adjudicator gender that are consistent across the two institutions, but again these are historical patterns and not necessarily reliable predictors for the future. The patterns are not further accentuated by crossing adjudicator and applicant gender. Female applicants had marginally better success rates with both male and female adjudicators.

Table Eight shows employee success rates by representation. There are no remarkable patterns other than the improved performance of grievants in the Authority, by comparison with the Tribunal, where either the grievant or the respondent employer chose to self-represent.

It will have been apparent from Table Five that, in terms of occupational profile, the personal grievant clientele of the Authority has changed a little from that of the Tribunal's adjudication jurisdiction. In the Authority, "pink collar" and "blue collar" workers together represent just 38 percent of grievants, whereas they were 53 percent of grievants in the Tribunal's adjudication jurisdiction. As a group, managerial and supervisory staff, together with professional, technical and white collar workers now represent 60 percent of grievants whose cases are decided by the Authority, with each of those sub-groups other than managers having greater representation before the Authority than before Tribunal adjudicators.

What this might suggest is that blue and pink collar workers are more amenable to settlement of their grievances by negotiation or mediation under the ERA mix of procedures, while white collar workers, including managerial and professional staff, are more inclined to want - or at least more likely to get - an investigation and determination from the Authority.

As is evident in Table Nine, managers, supervisors and administrators also appear to have fared better in the Authority than they did in the Tribunal, in terms of grievance outcomes. There are, on the other hand, no clear patterns of grievant success, or changes in grievant success rates between the Tribunal and the Authority, by industry of the respondent employer.

Table Three set out the distribution of Tribunal decisions and Authority determinations by the nature of the grievances. Table Ten sets out grievant success rates in the two institutions by the nature of the grievances. The numbers, in both the Tribunal and Authority samples, are essentially consistent with the broad pattern of grievant success in the Tribunal during the decade of the 1990s. The one exception would be the relatively sharp drop in applicant success rates in constructive dismissal cases coming before the Authority for determination.

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* This category includes cases where the primary issue involved proper submission of the grievance, the existence of an employment contract, or whether (other than in constructive dismissal cases) a dismissal occurred, as well as including grievances protesting dismissals for reasons other than misconduct, performance or redundancy.

Finally, before turning to examine the data for any statistically significant relationships that might allow for some real predictability in grievance outcomes, it is appropriate to set out the distribution of primary financial remedies to successful grievants.

Of successful grievants in the Tribunal sample, 63 percent received wage reimbursement awards, 85 percent received compensation awards under the humiliation head, while less than five percent received compensation awards under the "loss of benefits" head.

In the Authority sample, 50 percent of successful grievants received wage reimbursement awards, 86 percent received compensation awards for humiliation, loss of dignity, and injury to their feelings, and just three percent received compensation for "loss of benefits."

Table Eleven sets out, in dollar brackets, the distribution of awards of wage reimbursement and compensation for humiliation, loss of dignity, and injury to feelings to those successful grievants who received those awards. What Table Eleven shows is some movement, in both remedy categories, from the $1-4999 range to the $5000-9999 range, something which may simply reflect an allowance for inflation over time, or which may reflect a shift in decision-maker thinking. It is perhaps noteworthy that matters come to determination in the Authority more quickly than was often the case in the Tribunal, and yet wage awards have moved a little higher.

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	Introduction
	The Authority and Tribunal caseloads
	The personal grievance profile
	Grievance outcomes
	Determinations and remdies: looking for explanations
	Factors associated with grievance outcomes
	Grievance remedies
	Reduction of remedies
	Costs
	Summary conclusions