I feel, the whole South African legal system is geared toward ineptitude but, providing all the attorneys are equally incompetent, it balances out. Unfortunately some of them are crooked too. Forget the local law society (where one can theoretically take iffy solicitors to task), it just perpetuates the myth of the inviolacy of the legal profession.

I could tell you horror stories!

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Surely , since he was employed, as an ” expert” to oversee the whole dismissal procedure,( which included the court hearings), he was basically the architect of your misery?

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Evil tim lawyer,
The horrors you describe are substantially worse in South Africa and I have no doubt the UK will confidently swagger down the same blind alley.

Over here we have labour courts which are, theoretically, courts of equity. What they are in practice, are courts which are significantly biased toward the employee.

Let me give you a little example:
I had an employee a few years ago, let’s call him ‘Bob’. Bob was a nightmare, an employee from hell.

When we gave him the use of a company car and a fuel account and he ran up enormous fuel and maintenance bills because he was ferrying prostitutes around Johannesburg. We gave him a warning.

He habitually arrived late to work, usually still drunk from the night before. We gave him a warning.

He constantly pilfered equipment and stock. We gave him a warning.

Eventually he knocked out his foreman whilst on a client site because the foreman wouldn’t lend him a car to go to the pub for lunch!

We decided that, because of the demonstrable criminal component, and the impartial witnesses to this event we had a fair chance of sacking him.

We stuck to the letter of the Labour relations guidelines. We employed a labour lawyer to handle the procedure, set up tribunals and did the lot! Eventually, we gave him a letter to the effect that we were terminating his employment and gave him a months salary and paid out his leave in lieu.

Then he took us to court!

At the time I didn’t give it a second thought. Not in my wildest throes of pessimism did I think he had a case. Wrong!

The court action lasted three days and myself and my co-directors (all four of us) had to be in attendance (while the company went to wrack and ruin in our absence). The judge caught Bob lying on the stand no less than four times. I thought we were home and dry!

Wrong again. It seems, that the secretary who typed up this chap’s letter of dismissal had made a mistake. She put the date of the tribunal on the dismissal notice rather than the date at which the termination was issued. The judge held that this meant we had ‘pre-judged’ his guilt in the tribunal and therefore the tribunal was a sham.

The judge found that we had substantive reasons for dismissal and upheld our decision to fire Bob but also found that we had made procedural errors in terms of the act (such as the aforementioned dodgy date) and consequently awarded damages to the plaintiff in the order of one year’s salary.

We were a medium sized company and, whilst a years salary wouldn’t kill us, it was a bitter pill to swallow. The worst side effect of the case was that the remaining staff now felt they had carte blanche to do whatever they liked and the most severe penalty we could impose on them would be a year’s pay up front and no work to do!

Be careful over there!

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I for one don’t.

Laws that should be helpful regularly turn out to be hindrance.

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The trouble is that this happens in such a detailed, piecemeal way that it is hard for the public to comprehend what is going on.

Our employment and discrimination laws, for example, are doing just as much damage to the British economy as militant trade unions did in the 1960s and 1970s. The difference is that in the 1960s and 1970s everyone knew when the news was dominated by strikes in the car industry or the like. Eventually most people other than very doctrinaire left wingers realised that enough was enough.

This time, the damage that Employment Tribunals, Maternity Leave Regulations etc. are doing to our economy is much less reported, as it occurs in a piecemeal way. It hits hardest the smaller businesses, least able to follow the bureaucratic procedures now expected of them.

I know this from daily experience as a solicitor advising about half and half employers and employees.

When I am consulted about situations where, say, someone has been sacked because several witnesses saw them arrive for work two hours late reeking of alcohol, I often have to explain to disbelieving clients that the Employment Tribunal will hardly care about that. What matters is whether the employer remembered to follow all the procedures in sub-paragraph X of section Y of the ACAS code on disciplinary procedures.

Many of those who create the cumbersome laws and regulations must like to think that they are doing good. Sometimes, up to a point, they were. But they rarely understand the side effects, especially when the rules are applied by unimaginative junior functionaries, covering their backs by playing safe.

I saw an article in a legal newsletter recently querying whether the new law against age discrimination expected in October will lead to companies like Saga Holidays being sued if they continue to offer holidays for people over a certain age.

Yet holidays for the over 55s are surely a harmless thing that people should be allowed to have if they want them.

The article rightly concluded that government regulation has become so complicated that the only people who can understand the regulations are the specialists who draft them. However, their narrow specialism makes it impossible for them to tell what consequences the regulations will have in practice.

Some people reading this probably think I must be exaggerating about employment law. However, they will mostly be the people who have little experience of how it works in practice.

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On a y un gouvernement de branleurs.

Does that make me a terrorist suspect too ?

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If a party considers itself threatened by a single man shouting “rubbish,” perhaps it is quite correct; that’s all it takes. Ladies and gentlemen, to your bullhorns!

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A.C.Grayling has a long opinion piece in the Independent about this.

Philosophy’s aim is to encourage independence of mind and a critical ability to sift good things from bad things. Many of the problems that beset the world arise from unreflective acceptance of dogmas, which prompt knee-jerk reactions and polarisation of views. Obviously enough, a little more reflectiveness would go far to making the world a better place.

This is the last thing the Rammels of the NuLabor want. They want unreflective acceptance of dogma, and knee-jerk reactions. The study of philosophy is clearly subversive and dangerous, and must be stopped.

There was a programme on Channel 4 tonight by that chap who was arrested at a Labour party conference for shouting “Rubbish” at Jack Straw. It was a sad story. For 50 years, he’d been part of a Labour party tradition of intense debate, in which the party leaders could barely get themselves heard. Now it was all over: Labour party conferences were no longer debates, but staged photo-ops, in which dissent is suppressed by burly thugs.

And this intellectual failure shows. Bliar’s public pronouncements are invariably as intellectually vacuous as they are impassioned – and indeed impassioned because they are vacuous, since passion is needed to lend spurious force to what would otherwise appear to be the meaningless drivel that it actually is.

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