Is this a case of unfair dismissal?

Poppy9

Do you work in IT or just utilise IT as part of your job?

i.e if you work in IT and regularly put files in the wrong place which means staff cannot access files etc. then it's an issue.

If you are in an admin job and just saved a file to the wrong area, but it's a file only used by you I don't see it as much of a problem.

Everyone does make mistakes but it's the impact of the mistakes on the business that's important IMO.

i.e. I worked in an office where approx. 10 staff made grant claims to Govt. bodies. For various reasons a claim might be late and no doubt every member of staff would have submitted a late grant claim at some time. However I remember one person submitted a late claim and it cost the authority £1m as they refused to pay the grant due to the lateness of claim. The officer responsible was drastically demoted as it was a serious error and he had no valid reason for the late claim.

SarlE - can I ask you about treating employees equally. We have a new, extremely strict sickness policy imposed on us and they said they have done this as previously employees had been dismissed due to abuse of the sickness policy but as the authority could not prove it had treated the employee equally to others who may have committed similar offences then the authority had lost "unfair dismissal" cases. Not sure if they are BS us just to justify the introduction of the policy.

SarEl

wehalf wrote: »

It wasn't two years of disciplinary action. I mentioned that the first action was an IT problem, not my fault. The recent action has only been going for a few weeks but the fact that they are looking at my petty mistakes and not my colleagues', makes me think that they'd rather I wasn't there. If my performance was to be considered not doing the job properly, the whole department would be out a job as my performance is typical according to the lists of mistakes we are sent.

OK - I am going to lay this out as simply as possible. These are "petty mistakes" in your opinion. "Everybody makes them" in your opinion. This is not the employers opinion, clearly. It seems rather a huge assumption that this has anything to do with something that happened two years ago - frankly, disposing of someone quicker than that is childs play. Nobody is so perfect that an employer can't find grounds when they are looking for them. This has happened once in the last few weeks, but you have described an entire conspiracy story that started two years ago, and is rolling forward to a dismissal for something that you haven't yet even been charged with! How on earth do you know that if you stop making the mistakes, that isn't the end of the matter - which is what a disciplinary process is designed to bring about. And how do you know that if any of your colleaugues have made or make the number of mistakes you have (you said it was plural) they haven't been or won't also be disciplined? They aren't likely to be advertsing the fact, are they?

SarEl

Poppy9 wrote: »

SarlE - can I ask you about treating employees equally. We have a new, extremely strict sickness policy imposed on us and they said they have done this as previously employees had been dismissed due to abuse of the sickness policy but as the authority could not prove it had treated the employee equally to others who may have committed similar offences then the authority had lost "unfair dismissal" cases. Not sure if they are BS us just to justify the introduction of the policy.

You can - but would you mind starting a new thread as it isn't really polite of us to hijack the OP's thread on an entirely different sunject!

MrsTinks

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence here... I had far more concrete evidence of line manager trying to get me to quit (I'm sorry to say after 2 years she succeeded...), I had 5 grievances lodged, 4 upheld against her and the company and even a Director. I had a diary of incidents, multiple mails and coms backing up my view and trust me... even that wasn't going to be enough. That includes trying to put me on a PIP for being late/bad time keeping. The irony was that we were all office based on paper and yet most days I was the only one in the office (we all had days on client sites, but others worked from home when they pleased...) and she was the last in and first out if she showed up - all provable by our door fobs. But the problem I had was just because everyone ELSE including her did it - didn't mean it was permitted for ME to do it (in my case it was dropped when I pointed out that they could take into account my phone records and e-mail activity and we could discuss it with a tribunal as I was sure it was deeply inappropriate for directors to phone me at 7:30am to get slide packs put together for a meeting they knew about 3 weeks before and it wasn't my job to put together... either my job was "when required with some mutual flexibility" or it was 9-5 and they could whistle for any response outside those times...)

I will give you my honest advice here... find a new job! Either you are right and they will find a legal way of turfing you out, or you are wrong and you will carry on making yourself bitter and eventually make big mistakes and get the sack genuinely... that means it'll be harder to find a new job.

If you genuinely think your manager is bullying you then you follow the company process to deal with it. And you gather every scrap of evidence you can!

LegalSec

I recently went through something similar and trawled fromone website to another to get a better idea of employment law. Firstly, if the disciplinary was a couple ofyears ago then they might find it difficult to use against you now whereas ifthe warning(s) were only a few months old it would improve their right tofairly dismiss you. Secondly, you say ‘everyonemakes mistakes’ and despite what the other postings say I think this isimportant as your bosses are discriminating against you (you will need to thinkof why they are doing so such as age, race, gender, sexual orientation) and usethis in a grievance should things take a turn for the worse.

ILW

How does OP know that others are also making mistakes and not being spoken to about it?

Tiddlywinks

Humans make mistakes HOWEVER those little things seem a whole lot bigger when there is a spotlight shining on them...

You know you are being watched so you need to be extra careful about your performance standards.

I must say, for someone who is apparently so near to being sacked, you don't appear to be taking your mistakes seriously.

patman99

When I read that the mistakes were wrongly-placed coma's, it made me chuckle.
I am an agency worker at a blue-chip company and we all got sent an email from a senior manager regarding making sure that all communications were checked for grammar and spelling prior to being sent.
What a pity he failed to read his own email. It had no capitols, no punctuation marks such as commas and full-stops & contained 300 words in one large sentence.