Rolls Royce plc v Unite the Union

Rolls Royce plc v Unite the Union [2009] EWCA Civ 387 is a UK labour law case, concerning redundancy.

Rolls Royce plc v Unite the Union
CourtCourt of Appeal of England and Wales
Citation(s)[2009] EWCA Civ 387
Keywords
Redundancy

Facts

In the collective agreements between Rolls Royce and Unite, each year of service gave employees an extra point against selection for redundancy. Rolls Royce, challenging the collective agreement that it had itself agreed to, asked the court whether this was compatible with the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006.

The High Court[1] held that under EE(A)R 2006 r 3, the employer would have a defence to age discrimination because the collective agreement pursued a legitimate business aim, and in any case points for long service conferred a benefit on employees within regulation 32. Rolls Royce argued that the judge had failed to consider whether the provision was proportionate, and there was no ‘benefit’ under regulation 32.

Judgment

Arden LJ, Wall LJ and Aikens LJ dismissed the appeal in the Court of Appeal. Although the length of service criterion could be indirect discrimination, it pursued a legitimate aim, especially where part of a collective agreement. Although the judge did not explicitly deal with proportionality, objectively his decision was correct, and it was unnecessary to reach a view on regulation 32. But if pushed, they would have said he was right.

Notes
  1. [2008] EWHC 2420 (QB)
gollark: Unless it supports websockets and we never noticed.
gollark: Wouldn't connecting it require a backend server of some sort to proxy to IRC?
gollark: This is where GEORGE discussion occurs.
gollark: Quite plausibly.
gollark: I don't really know what a good way to do search™ is; SQLite is somewhat unconcurrent wrt. insertions and slow, PostgreSQL has awful search.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.