Possible discrimination

aidy93

My employer is only furloughing high risk staff which is fair enough. I had to self isolate as my wife became ill, she is a childminder and had children of nhs workers in her care.
I never got furlough, they would only give me SSP which i believe is lawful. 
But my manager refused to give me holidays instead of SSP.  He said no holidays during covid 19.
A few days into my SSP, my colleague arrived to work and asked for a holiday, was told no, and then told manager hell just go home sick. Manager then agreed to holiday.

Cant understand why he got holiday snd not me, i was off on SSP anyway with an abundance of holidays to spare. And now when furloughed staff come back will be hard to get holidays

Is this a strong enough case to argue discrimination or is it just going to black ball me with manager and possibly get sacked

Undervalued

Firstly "discrimination" in employment is perfectly lawful unless it is on one of the legally protected grounds e.g. race, gender, religion etc.

Secondly, an employer has always been able to dictate when you can and cannot take your holiday. They must give notice of twice the length of the holiday to force you to take it plus, subject to the recently extended carry over rules, they must allow you to take your statutory holiday at some point during the year.

They do no have to treat everybody the same as long as it is not due to unlawful discrimination.

Mrsn

Really don’t see you being able to take this far with management to be honest and even if you did I suspect it wouldn’t be in your best interests long term.

You were specifically told no holidays when you asked and that’s what they’ve stuck to, as above it doesn’t have to be the same for other employees.

aidy93

Never thought for a second you could have one rule for one employee and not the other. 

lincroft1710

aidy93 said:

Never thought for a second you could have one rule for one employee and not the other. 

The subtlety is that it is not a rule. Unless there is unlawful discrimination employers do not have to treat employees equally, your co-worker who sits next to you and does exactly the same job as you can lawfully be paid twice as much as you for the same hours.

JamoLew

unless is it a protected characteristic ie age, gender,race then employers are free to discriminate between employees as they see fit

gettingtheresometime

The other way of looking at it is that you still have holidays to take whereas the other employee didn't. 

The company may decide to let you carry over a certain percentage of unused holidays or may even buy them off you.