Tesco Legal Guard

[CornishPasty]

Re: Tesco Legal Guard

Shameless bump.....

[SpringerSpaniel]

Re: Tesco Legal Guard

If you are caring for a person with a disability, not to allow you reasonable adjustments is regarded as disability discrimination. There is a test case on this, Attridge v Coleman Law. This can include adjusted working hours and time off to provide care.

Your employers may well be in breach of this, so you can claim for disability discrimination in the employment tribunal (apart from anything else, eg unfair dismissal).

South Manchester has a Law Centre which can give you free advice Law Centres, I think there is also one in North Manchester, don't know whereabouts you are based.

[CornishPasty]

Re: Tesco Legal Guard

Thanks very much, SS! To be honest, the company has a bad track record when it comes to giving people time off for, well, anything. It's really very unsympathetic.

They could, however, argue that I never gave them opportunity to approve time off for this reason because I didn't follow their exact guidelines for requesting an absense.

Charity above, however, says that I could then counter that argument by saying I was never given appropriate access to the policy.

I'm at a stage where I really, really don't know how to proceed.

Perhaps I'm looking at things from the wrong point of view. I'm hoping that the tribunal consider that what my employer has done is cruel, mean, heartless, harsh (whatever you wish) considering the nature of the absense but that's not really the duty of the tribunal, is it ?

I just cannot imagine anyone would genuinely believe, having provided evidence from GPs, that I wasn't need to be at home as a carer, regardless of what else I was doing while there.

My only mistake, in my opinion, was not following the company's own policy for getting time off work, but I do feel I made a reasonable effort given previous situations.

I do feel that the letter I got from the solicitor saying she won't take on my case is missing a lot of points and I'm concerned that things have been missed that could ultimately have made her decision different.

As she points out though, the job of a tribunal isn't to decide whether the employer was right or wrong, but is to decide whether the 'punishment' was appropriate.

I maintain that it wasn't. I genuinely do. I think that considering my record was absolutely clear over eight years of employment and given the circumstances surrounding my need for the time off, the punishment was too harsh considering other options were available - final written warning etc.