10th September 2010
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This month
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Legal updates
- Climate change discrimination
- Age discrimination in redundancy selection
- Dismissal following break-down of negotiations
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Case archive
Enquiries
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Age discrimination in redundancy selection
Rolls-Royce vs Unite
EAT/0293/08
Key facts
Rolls-Royce brought this case to the High Court to test the legality of the lawfulness of using redundancy criteria agreed with Unite under a collective agreement. One part of that agreement was that length of service (along with other factors) should be used, which the Union now claimed was discriminatory.
Decision
The EAT took the view that length of service could be objectively justified as proportionate because it was a reward for loyalty, helped maintain a stable workforce and fulfilled a business need and therefore upheld the collective agreement.
Our view
This sounds perverse – particularly since the judgement has described redundancy as a “reward for loyalty”. In the particular situation that Rolls-Royce are in, the judgement may well make sense, but age discrimination claims are bound to follow other attempts to use length of service as a major factor in deciding who to make redundant.
