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Victory for good sense
• UNISON welcomes the eminently sensible judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in the Lillian Ladele case (Registrar ‘failed to do her job’, December 24).
First, credit where credit is due: we congratulate those members of the council executive who decided to put principle above penny-pinching and backed the appeal against the original tribunal decision.
We welcome the EAT’s decision that the original tribunal findings of discrimination and harassment against Unison members was not just an error of law, but that there was “no proper evidential basis on which a tribunal could properly have concluded that there was direct discrimination [and/or harassment] on the grounds of religious belief”.
This is particularly important, given the repeated claims from Ms Ladele’s lawyers that she was “shunned” by colleagues – a claim even the original tribunal dismissed, and which her own counsel could not substantiate when challenged by the president of the EAT at the appeal hearing.
The EAT makes it quite clear that the reason why our members protested, and the council took action, was not because of Ms Ladele’s religious beliefs, but the fact that she was refusing to do her job and, quite frankly, not pulling her weight in the team.
Her belief may have been the reason for her action but it was not the reason for Islington’s response, and the reason for the response is, the EAT said, at the heart of deciding whether there has been discrimination on a prohibited ground. (A Unison member has recently won a race case against Islington at a different tribunal on this precise point.)
Her refusal to perform civil partnerships may have been based on a religious belief, but that belief is irrelevant to her work for a local authority – private prejudice has no place in public service.
Some have said that Islington should have been reasonable and made adjustments to accommodate Ms Ladele’s beliefs. Unison’s view is that any adjustment which permits an individual to practise discrimination cannot be said to be reasonable.
That, in essence, was what Ms Ladele was asking for and which the council quite rightly refused. As the EAT says, Islington was “not required to connive in what they perceived to be unacceptable discriminatory behaviour”. Nor should any employer.
The crucial point made by the EAT is that “a manifestation of [a] belief must give way when it involves discriminating on grounds which Parliament has provided to be unlawful”. This follows from the (wrongly derided) anarchist analogy in the EAT judgment – you cannot break the law because your faith or belief contradicts it.
If the anarchist story may seem too extreme, let me offer an alternative closer to home. Legislation passed by Parliament in the 1980s against trade unions is fundamentally at odds with my strongly held trade union beliefs, but that is the law. I don’t like it, and I campaign against it to get the law changed. If I break those laws, I would not be shocked or surprised to find myself facing a legal challenge from the employers concerned.
The same should apply to Ms Ladele. She can campaign through her church for a change in legislation covering civil partnerships, but until that happens she does not have the right to opt out of part of her work because she finds it personally distasteful. She – no more than me – cannot pick and choose which parts of your job you do dependent on personal whim.
You have already had correspondents criticising the decision on no better grounds than it happens to be Mr Justice Elias’s last judgment before his retirement as President of the EAT.
In Unison’s view, if that was the last game of “the Pele of employment law”, he played a blinder…
JANE DOOLAN
Branch secretary, Islington Unison
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