United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	No appearance or representation by or on behalf of the Appellant


 


MR RECORDER UNDERHILL QC

1. There has been no appearance by the Appellant on this preliminary hearing of her appeal against the decision of an Employment Tribunal sitting at Shrewsbury to dismiss her claims for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. We therefore proceed directly to a judgment.
2. The Appellant was employed by the Respondents as a Store Manageress. At a meeting with her manager on 2 September 1999 she handed over a letter of resignation. In her claim to the Employment Tribunal she claimed:

a) that her resignation was in response to a number of breaches of contract by her employer and consequently that she was constructively dismissed;

and

b) that she had been discriminated against on the grounds of her sex.

3. The grounds attached to her IT1 focus on her poor working relationship with the District Manager responsible for her store, Mr Quickfall, who had given her a number of disciplinary warnings. She alleged that the cause of the bad relationship was that he was a 'male chauvinist' and could not tolerate women who would not defer to him.
4. So far as the claim for constructive dismissal is concerned, the Tribunal held that the reason for the Appellant's resignation was not the problems which she had had with Mr Quickfall, but the decision of the Respondents to send her on a retraining course in Leicester, which meant that she would be away from home at the time her father was terminally ill. The Tribunal pointed out that she had a mobility clause in her contract and that on the face of it a decision to require her to work away was not a breach of contract. In some circumstances the unreasonable exercise of such a right might of course constitute a breach of the duty of the employer not to act in a way which unjustifiably undermines the relationship of trust and confidence between employer and employee; but in this case the Tribunal found as a fact that the Appellant had never raised the problem about her father's illness with the manager whose decision it was - Mr Heatherington - and that had she done so he would not have insisted on her going. In those circumstances, the Tribunal found that there was no constructive dismissal. That decision depends on a finding of primary fact as to what Mr Heatherington had been told. Neither in the Appellant's short formal grounds of appeal nor in the less formal document apparently served with them has the Appellant raised any argument that might suggest that the Tribunal was not entitled in law to reach that finding.
5. As for the allegation of sex discrimination, the Tribunal found that the Appellant had been subjected to detriment in two respects:

a) the disciplinary warnings that she had received from Mr Quickfall;

b) the decision to send her on a training course.

It declined to hold that her poor working relationship with Mr Quickfall was itself a detriment. We detect no challenge to those findings. The Tribunal then went on to consider whether those detriments were the result of sex discrimination. In respect of both of them it found as a fact that there were genuine, that is to say non-sex discriminatory, grounds for the decision that was taken; and again the Appellant in her grounds has failed to identify any reason for saying that those were factual findings that were not open to the Tribunal.

6. In those circumstances, the appeal is bound to fail and must be dismissed.