Empty justice

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Empty justice [ 68 kb] - The non-payment of employment tribunal awards

Summary

Citizens Advice Bureaux provide advice on and assistance with more than 500,000 employment problems a year. Some of these involve the redundancies, company mergers and other business changes that are inevitable in a dynamic economy. But in a great many cases the client is a worker who has been denied one or more of his or her statutory workplace rights by an employer.

The principal legal remedy available to such workers is the making of a claim to an Employment Tribunal (ET). However, the process is dauntingly legalistic and adversarial, and the cost of legal representation prohibitive – there is no ‘legal aid’, and the resources of bureaux and other sources of free legal representation (such as community law centres) are extremely limited. And, for many workers, the legal protection supposedly offered by this system is in any case rendered meaningless by their fear of being victimised or dismissed simply for making a Tribunal claim, or even just for raising the matter with their employer.

Empty justice [ 68 kb] - The non-payment of employment tribunal awards