Case Studies
Case studies for the Advertising Sector
1. The Age Discrimination dismissal
Simon is 47 years old and works at a large advertising agency as a senior account manager. He has been there for 15 years. Having worked his way up over the years from dealing with the smaller clients he is now spending all his time running the account for Client x which is one of the biggest clients at the agency. The other big client at the agency is Client y.
Last week the agency lost the Client y account to a rival agency. Simon has been told that he has been provisionally selected for redundancy. During consultation Simon was told that the loss of the Client y account meant that the agency were looking at all options and as he had the highest salary of all account managers he would be potentially at risk.
If the employer chooses to dismiss an employee because they are high earners because of their length of service in the company it can be argued that the dismissal would give rise to claims for unfair dismissal and indirect age discrimination if the only reason to dismiss was because of Simon’s higher salary. This is because the employer should not take into consideration factors which only apply to Simon because of his age.
We have taken on many cases in relation to indirect discrimination in the past and have successfully shown that to take into consideration factors which impact adversely on a protected group (such as older employees, in this case) is unlawful.
2. New Creative Director, Same old Tricks
The Creative department of an agency has 6 creative teams. All teams are composed of one copywriter and one art director. Two teams are junior, two are middle ranking and the remaining two are senior.
A new Creative Director has now joined the agency and holds a redundancy exercise. He (Creative Directors are nearly all still men!) decides to sack the two junior teams, one of the middle ranking teams and one of the senior teams at the agency. The reasons cited for the redundancy are costs pressures and a lack of recent pitches won.
Soon after the dust has settled on the redundancies, the Creative Director makes new hires and to no one’s surprise all the new creative teams are the teams that he worked with at his previous agency.
Unfortunately it is a scenario we have seen many times before. A creative sacked in this way may have a claim for unfair dismissal because there was no fair reason for the dismissal.
Even if the employer has followed a fair procedure the redundancy is still a sham because the new Creative Director simply wanted to bring in people with whom he had worked before.
3. The Sex Discrimination dismissal
Sally is an Account Manager at a well-known advertising agency. Sally’s work has always been of excellent quality and she is highly regarded in the agency. She has been at the agency for 5 years and has worked previously in large agencies.
Sally has worked part time for about a year following the birth of her first child. The arrangement has worked well although her line manager initially made discriminatory comments to her about women in the workplace not being as effective if they worked part time following having children.
She later found out through her line manager that a client has said that they are not happy with her working part time and she has been told that she is to have her employment terminated.
She lodged a grievance on the ground that the Employer should not have simply taken a knee-jerk response to a client’s comments but should instead have taken steps to deal with the situation more constructively. Not surprisingly her grievance was not upheld. She appealed the decision but the appeal was also not upheld.
An approach was made to the client by us to try to understand their concerns. It transpired that the real reason that the client was not happy is because the person who dealt with Sally’s work when she was not in the office was not providing as good a level of service.
In this case the Employer should have met with Sally to discuss the client’s comments and to devise ways of dealing with the fact that she was not working 5 days a week by ensuring that the client’s needs were met.
After proceedings were brought the employer agreed to pay a significant sum to cover the losses that were sought including recognition of the difficulties Sally would have in mitigating her loss given that she wanted to work part time.
4. The Poor Performance Dismissal
Peter works in the studio on pre and post-production. He has been at his agency for 4 years. Peter’s appraisals have been good. However his particular style of working differs from that of his line manager, the head of design.
Without any prior warning Peter was told that he was to be disciplined for a number of recent so-called “poor quality issues” and that steps would be taken to monitor his work and that if his work did not improve he would be dismissed.
There followed a series of meetings at which Peter was provided with a number of tasks, all of which he performed well. However his manager was still not happy saying that although he performed those particular tasks well his work in general was not up to scratch. Peter felt that the criticisms of his work were vague and unstructured. He complained that it seemed to him that the goalposts were being moved and that there seemed to be nothing that he could do to satisfy his manager.
Peter was dismissed for poor performance. He appealed the decision to dismiss him but failed in the appeal.
In these circumstances it is unfair of an employer to terminate employment when the employee has met all the conditions that were placed on him during a performance monitoring exercise. We threatened to bring proceedings on behalf of Peter for unfair dismissal and the employer settled his claim.
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