A 31 year old mum is still waiting for Tom and Erin’s in Weymouth to pay her the £28000 fine she was awarded by an employment tribunal 3 years ago.
‘Lydia Stone, 31, has all but given up receiving any of the £28,000 she was awarded three years ago for being unfairly sacked from an ice-cream parlour, Tom & Erin’s in Weymouth. Stone lost her job when she told her employer she was pregnant. “The next morning I had a letter from the owner saying my employment was over,” she says. Stone took her case to an employment tribunal and received an unequivocal judgment: “The claimant was unlawfully discriminated against on the grounds of her sex,” it says. Again, though, her former employer liquidated the company and transferred its assets to a sister company called Tom & Erin’s Gift Shop. It matters little that the new company is registered at the same address and sells the same products. “The shop is still there: it’s open for business and selling ice cream. It just seems so wrong that they can get away with it,” says Stone.’
Is this the behaviour that local people and businesses should be proud of? The judgment was ‘unequivocal’ therefore it is not that any scope for disagreement exists.
Next time you are passing by pop in and ask them when Lydia is going to get her money. Perhaps suggest that your continued custom depends upon it. Then we can clean up Britain from the bottom up.
Douglas James
Firms pay in full on just half of tribunal claims
