Glasgow property factor ordered to pay £54k to sacked worker

The tribunal heard that the worker, named in court documents as Mr S Cohen, was phoned on July 18 and asked to attend a meeting at short notice, without being told what it was about.

Concerned, he sought advice from a friend who works as an employment lawyer, and decided to record the meeting on his phone.

The company's own note-taker had prepared a minute of the meeting, but the tribunal found this was not a verbatim record, instead offering a "sanitised" summary written up afterwards that did not reflect what was actually said.

Employment Judge Peter O'Donnell instead relied on Mr Cohen's transcript and found the company's own witnesses, including the director who fired him, had misremembered the meeting entirely.

According to the transcript, the meeting began as a vague dressing-down and an accusation that Mr Cohen had sworn in front of a client, followed by references to him "snapping" on unspecified other occasions, then a complaint about his "attitude".

However, no one was willing to say exactly what he had done wrong.

At one point during the conversation, associate director Jasmine McKenna asked him to stop pointing at her.

Mr Cohen replied that he was not pointing at all, and asked whether she was now telling him how he should move his own body, before asking if she was even aware he was dyslexic and dyspraxic.

When she said they were just trying to have a conversation, he asked her to address what he had actually said rather than how he looked. He also offered to put his hands under his legs.

Mr Cohen told Ms McKenna he believed he was legally entitled to more annual leave than he had been given, as he had been working six days a week since November, he said, and was being told he was only entitled to three days' holiday, which he branded "not only laughable but illegal".

He said he thought he should take the company to a tribunal.

Ms McKenna asked him to hold on, and walked out. She came back with director of operations Jennifer Harkins whose opening words, the transcript shows, were to ask Mr Cohen to "talk me through your thoughts on tribunals and everything else you are talking about".

When he raised his holiday entitlement, Ms Harkins cut him off, telling him the meeting was not about holidays at all, but about him swearing in front of clients.

Mr Cohen said he had had a stressful day and a family row, and could not recall swearing.

Ms Harkins told him everyone has stressful days. When he pushed back and said he suspected the real reason he had been hauled in was for asserting his rights, Ms Harkins told him it was in fact his "attitude" that was the problem.

She criticised him for chewing gum and swinging on his chair in the meeting, warning him not to "sit back and swing with your chest out".

When a colleague was brought in to repeat the allegation that Mr Cohen had told her to "tell them to go f*** themselves" about other staff wanting his shift, Mr Cohen suggested they simply gather witness statements to establish what had actually happened.

Ms Harkins responded: "You know what — forget it. Just go, OK. What we'll do, we'll just terminate your contract."

When Mr Cohen tried to respond, she told him: "If you don't want to engage properly and go into this legal that you need to do, then go. You're not gonna work for us if you're gonna have that attitude."

Asked directly if he was being sacked, Ms Harkins confirmed he was, insisting it was not over "today's attitude," even as her own words linked his dismissal directly to his talk of lawyers and tribunals.

The tribunal rejected the company's later attempts to blame swearing and "attitude" for the sacking, with the judge pointing out that neither was ever raised with Mr Cohen at the time, appeared in his dismissal letter, or featured in the company's own paperwork.

Judge O'Donnell ruled it had all been "advanced after the fact", and that the "principal reason for the claimant's dismissal was that he had asserted a statutory right", making the dismissal automatically unfair.

The tribunal found Ross & Liddell had failed on almost every front. It emerged Mr Cohen, contracted for just six hours a week, had actually clocked up 1,450 hours of unpaid overtime, all paid at his basic rate instead of the time-and-a-half his contract promised.

He was also never given his full holiday pay, or allowed to bring anyone with him once the meeting turned disciplinary, and did not receive a written statement of his employment terms until nine months into the job, well past the legal deadline.

The judge said the company had "wholly failed" to follow the Acas Code of Practice, giving Mr Cohen no warning he could lose his job and no real chance to defend himself, and hit the award with a 15% uplift as a result.

In total, Ross & Liddell has been ordered to pay Mr Cohen £54,545.50.

Of that, £36,743.42, was for unfair dismissal, made up of 38 weeks' lost pay at £831.60 a week, plus £350 for loss of statutory rights.

A further £12,585.68 was awarded for unpaid wages, covering the 1,450 hours of overtime. There was also £1,890 in unpaid holiday pay and a further £1,663.20 for the breach of his right to be accompanied to the meeting.

A separate claim that his treatment amounted to disability discrimination was dismissed, and a bid to add a new claim over failures to make reasonable adjustments was refused as too late.

Ross & Liddell Limited has been contacted for comment.