Bullied out of a job - claim Constructive Dismissal

Horbrarian

After 2 years of being belittled and manipulated by my manager, I recently resigned. If I'd stayed, I think I'd be headed for a breakdown.
The actions of my manager included:

• Swearing at me in a public place.
• Telling me that other people in the team were better than me and would gain promotions.
• Refusing to acknowledge career aspirations in an appraisal, making his own demeaning suggestion, then lying about it later.
• Making up alleged performance issues, badgering me about them and then putting restrictions on my role, making it hard to do my job.
• Storming out of supervision meetings, threatening formal action because I asked about the performance issues.

To add to this, two members of the team had periods off work with stress, citing his behaviour as the cause, 2 members left the job stating he contributed to this - informing management/HR of the issues.
I followed what I thought was a reasonable course of action, speaking to HR, his manager and being clear that I wanted things to improve, not to score points or cause trouble. Things got a lot worse after that, the performance issues were verging on the ridiculous and his manner became unbearably condescending and aloof. Trouble was, HR were not only buying his stance, they were missing out details of my issues when minuting meetings.
I eventually took out a grievance, with supporting witness statements from 2 ex-employees and one existing employee. In summary, they misrepresented a meeting with the employee witness, ignored the ex-employees evidence and several previous complaints against him and found against me. I appealed, stating that some of the findings were flawed and that several of the managers statements could be shown to be untrue. Despite this, my appeal failed and I was left out on a limb, cut of from my team and being given the cold shoulder by anyone in management.
I'm saddened to learn that most constructive dismissal claims aren't successful. What is there to protect individuals at work from bullying and emotional damage in these situations?
I have paid for some legal advice, being told that I may have a case. However, now unemployed, I don't want to throw good money after bad. Any thoughts? Just getting another job and forgetting about it isn't that easy; job markets, age and loss of confidence are making this difficult.

pinkshoes

Walk away, forget it, and find another job. It is not worth the stress. Life is too short.

ValHaller

You walked out. Game over.

You did it to avoid a breakdown. Taking the matter to law is not consistent with that.

There is no such thing as justice. Believe that and you will not be disappointed. Karma will catch this character out. Your grievance probably has been noted although the first rule of handling grievances is never to concede them. If the employer has not noticed the substance of your grievance and is not addressing it, karma will catch out your former employer

zugzwang

Constructive Dismissal is notoriously difficult to prove and win.

They will just come back with attacks on you: 'what did you do to resolve things', 'can you prove this happened', ' etc, etc, etc.

Unless you have an outstanding case- incontestable evidence which clearly shows there was no way on gods sweet earth you could continue, I'd forget it. eg your job description was changed to involve 3,000 hours a day of levitation carrying 40 tonnes on potatoes. Under water.

And even at that- not worth the stress as pinkshoes says.