With ANZAC Day falling on a Saturday this year,  the new Holidays (Full Recognition of Waitangi Day and ANZAC Day) Amendment Act or, as it is more commonly known, the ‘Mondayisation Bill’, will have its first big impact.

Until now, compensatory awards for hurt and humiliation for employees bringing successful personal grievances have commonly been between $5,000 and $7,000. Costs awards are normally far lower than the actual costs incurred, so the likelihood is that the employee will be out of pocket.

The Privacy Commissioner’s office have produced a guidance note explaining what types of cases the Human Rights Review Tribunal (HRRT) can hear under the Privacy Act.  Before you can take a case to the HRRT, the Privacy Commissioner’s office must have investigated the aspects of your complaint that you want the Tribunal to consider.  Click here to see the guidance note.

The Holidays Act 2003 provides that on one or more separate occasions an employee can request that his or her employer pay out a portion of the employee’s annual leave entitlement. There are conditions and restrictions to this cashing up provision (sections 28A-F), the main ones of which are outlined below:

The Human Rights Review Tribunal has found Credit Union Baywide, trading as NZCU Baywide, interfered with the privacy of a former employee by distributing a Facebook screenshot to Hawke’s Bay employment agencies with a warning against employing her.

A clause in an employment agreement that provided a commonly used clause did not entitle an employer to deduct four weeks pay from an employee’s pay when the employee left without giving the requisite notice.  The clause stated:

Judge Inglis has repeated her reservations about the “double-whammy” effect of dismissal and a damages claim, both arising out of the same poor performance during the employment relationship. She considers that it “sits uncomfortably with the statutory mechanisms for resolving employment relationship issues and may well have a chilling effect on employees considering a personal grievance, concerned not to prompt a retaliatory damages claim in response” (Rainbow Falls Organic Farm Ltd v Rockell [2014] NZEmpC 136.

With the recent amendments to the Employment Relations Act 2000 removing the “30-day rule” from 6 March 2015, there may be some confusion as to what employment agreement employers should be offering new employees.

The first issue was whether a 100% reduction in remedies was in fact permitted by s 124 of the Act (reducing the remedy due to contributing behaviour by the employee).  Chief Judge Colgan considered that there was a “respectable argument” that it was not, but he thought the matter needed to be addressed another time and by a full court.

The Employment Court agreed with the Authority in penalising the misleading and deceptive actions of a charitable trust that misled the unions it was bargaining with so that they believed government funding constrained it from agreeing to a greater increase in wages. It also agreed that the trust had conferred an unlawful preference upon non-union employees by giving them an increase backdated beyond that given to union members.