should DH be made to use a rest day to attend court as a witness

sangie595

Poppie68 wrote: »

He's not sick though, and there's no indication the incident between 2 co-workers has made him ill, the problem is he is using his day off to attend court like many other workers around the country do daily alternatively others like the ops husband could request unpaid leave or book a holiday.

Actually, he is not only sick, he is disabled! Heart conditions are automatically considered disabilities, and the OP has said that he needs a rest day to be able to manage due to his ongoing condition. He therefore has every right in law to ask for another rest day as a reasonable adjustment, and the employer would be entirely foolish to refuse. That doesn't mean the employer must pay him for the day in court, but that is covered by loss of earnings claims. But to tell him that he must use his rest day to go to court is unreasonable, as that would not be a rest. We are talking about a reasonable adjustment of one day out of 365. Few employers get away with such an easy reasonable adjustment.

OP. take this back to the union. There wouldn't be much they could do about insisting he should get the court day as a "working day", but I would suspect that the argument above would have merit and they could probably get agreement from the employer.

Poppie68

It's nothing to do with his employer though, one private individual is taking another to court, the husband is a witness. Imho I think the employer is being unfair as it did happen on their premises so they do have some scope for discretion, even if they offered it unpaid.
A doctor's letter presented to the court relating to his heart problem will also help as they will take it into account if he has to wait around.

pmduk

Is this a criminal or civil case? If criminal, I'd be arguing that it'd part of his work duties as he witnessed it whilst working.