Employment disputes
We will read your employment file the way the other side will read it, put the events into one timeline, and answer the claim on what the record actually supports.
When an employment dispute starts
A former employee filed a claim
The document arrives with a deadline attached and describes events you remember differently. What you remember is not evidence; what was written down at the time is.
A resignation is being called dismissal
Someone left after a conversation, and now says they were pushed. Whether that conversation was a choice or an instruction is the entire case.
A manager left with the client list
The departure and the confidentiality question arrive together, and each one changes how the other should be handled. Handling one alone is how the other gets damaged.
Your investigation has stalled
An allegation was made internally and nobody can say who owns it, what the standard is, or when it ends. An investigation without an end date becomes its own problem.
The file contradicts the story
Appraisals say one thing, the dismissal letter says another, and both are signed by you. Whoever reads them later will read them side by side.
A collective issue is forming
What began as one person’s complaint is now several people with the same wording. The response that suited one of them will not suit the group.
What an employment dispute turns on
An employment dispute is decided mostly by documents that were created before anyone knew there would be a dispute. Appraisals, warnings, the wording of an offer, a notice of a meeting, the letter that ended it. By the time a claim arrives, that record is closed, and the case is a reading of it.
The second thing to know is that these disputes are asymmetric by design. The international convention on termination of employment states that employment shall not be terminated unless there is a valid reason connected with the capacity or conduct of the worker, or based on the operational requirements of the business. It also provides that, so the worker does not carry the burden alone, the burden of proving that valid reason may rest on the employer. That convention applies in the states that have ratified it and only there; where you are, national law is what governs, and many national systems arrive at a similar position by their own route. Which one applies to you is the first thing we check.
What you get
- A reading of your own file as the other side will read it.
- The events in one timeline, sourced to documents rather than recollection.
- A position stated in writing, with the parts of it that are weak named as weak.
- The responses drafted, and the meeting or hearing prepared for.
- The template or the practice that produced the dispute, rewritten.
What the record has to show
- That the reason given at the time is the reason relied on now.
- That the person was told what was wrong and had a chance to answer it.
- That comparable situations were handled comparably.
- That notice, or payment in place of it, followed what the contract and the law required.
- That the final calculation can be reproduced from its inputs.
What stays on your side
- Telling us what happened, including the part that looks bad.
- Preserving the messages, files and access logs, from the day you learn of the claim.
- Deciding how far to go, once you know what each route asks of you.
- Keeping one person on your side who speaks about the matter.
The same convention lists reasons that can never be valid ones: union membership or activity, acting as a workers’ representative, bringing a complaint or proceedings against the employer, race, colour, sex, marital status, family responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin, and absence during maternity leave. Temporary absence through illness or injury sits in the same category. Where a dismissal touches any of these, the analysis changes before it begins.
Sources: Termination of employment instruments (International Labour Organization), annexing the Termination of Employment Convention, 1982 — articles 4, 5 and 6 on valid and invalid reasons, article 9(2) on the burden of proof, article 11 on notice.
Stages of work
The first read of everything.
Contract, offer, policies, appraisals, warnings, messages, the final letter and the payslips. We read them in the order they were made, because that order is what a decision-maker will follow.
The timeline, and what supports it.
Every event gets a date and a document behind it. The gaps that appear here are the case: an instruction nobody wrote down, a warning nobody delivered, a meeting with no note.
The position, weak parts included.
We will write what your file supports and what it does not. You need the second half before you decide anything, because the other side will find it whether or not you have.
Answering, or opening a conversation.
Where this can end between the parties, that is where it should end. We will draft the response, or the approach, so that it closes the matter on terms you can live with and does not concede a point you would need later.
The body that hears it.
Where it does not settle, the claim goes to whichever forum has jurisdiction over employment where the work sat, with its own deadlines and its own rules on evidence. We will prepare the file for that forum and represent you through it.
The practice that caused it.
One dispute is an event; the same dispute twice is a template. We will rewrite the document or the step that produced it, so the next departure does not arrive the same way.
Where the work is preparing an exit properly before any of this starts, that is termination support.
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