Legal advice: Court rejects whistleblower's victimisation claim

By thePublican.com's team of legal experts from London solicitors Joelson Wilson.​

Everybody knows that only two things in life are guaranteed: death and taxes.

Oh, and the fact that if you are an employer, you may as well give up before you start as (rightly or wrongly) the courts are all out to get you and will bend over backwards to help your employees.

However, in a recent case concerning a former employee of a well-known company the court refused to ride to the employee's rescue.

The case concerned the consequences of several allegations she had made about certain matters while employed there, prior to leaving the company.

Over the following years the ex-employee claimed her former employer made several statements about her as a result of those allegations which she said placed her current and ongoing employment at risk.

Although I do not have details of her allegations, they must have been serious as she claimed that by making them she became a whistleblower and could therefore sue her ex-employer if it had victimised her for that reason.

The question was, however, as the victimisation (the statements by the ex-employer) happened after the former employee had left, was she in fact protected? Not a problem, she thought. For several years the courts have protected people who have been victimised on grounds of sex, race or disability (among others) even where the victimisation happened after the employment had ended.

She gave examples where former employees who had been victimised after their employment had ended and could trace the cause of their victimisation to a gender or race-based reason, had successfully taken their former employer to court. She cited, for example, the case of a former employee who had been refused a reference, and an ex-employee who had not been allowed to have his old job back.

The complainant argued that surely if they had won, there was no good reason why she, as a whistleblower, should not do the same. But the court was not prepared to extend the law's protection to her. So, a little bit of joy for employers - until, that is, the case is overturned on appeal, or Parliament passes a new law to protect whistleblowers in these circumstances!