A woman who was made redundant from haulage firm Eddie Stobart while pregnant has been awarded £10,000 in compensation.
Caitlin Graham was working as a planner for the company at its Newhouse depot near Motherwell. However, her job and those of nine other planners were put at risk of redundancy in March last year as part of a restructuring exercise.
The ten roles were to be replaced with four new "transport shift manager" (TSM) jobs, advertised as vacancies within the business for anyone to apply for. Glasgow Live reports Ms Graham put herself forward for one of the roles, hoping as she was pregnant her job would be protected.
In an email to a company HR worker, she wrote: "I believe that due to being a pregnant employee who will be on maternity leave...I must be prioritised over fellow employees for posts. I understand if this does not happen then it would be unfair dismissal."
However, the firm rebuked this claim and said that she did not have an "automatic entitlement to promotion" because the new jobs were of a higher grade. She interviewed for the role the day before her maternity leave was due to begin, but was not successful.
She went on to email a written grievance to the company, claiming that her bosses had failed to find her a suitable vacancy and that she had not been able to properly prepare for the interview. But Eddie Stobart made her redundancy official weeks later, and she was dismissed from the company on May 26.
An employment tribunal heard that the emails regarding Ms Graham's grievance were filtered out by Eddie Stobart's IT security system, meaning they never reached the company. This only became apparent in March this year.
And while employment judge Stuart Neilson accepted that she had been "upset by the manner in which her case was dealt with", he found that Eddie Stobart had not erred in giving the job to someone else.
Based on evidence submitted by the company, he concluded: "The Tribunal accepted that the claimant [Ms Graham] did lack the kind of management experience that would be required in the TSM role."
He ruled that the company should pay Ms Graham £10,000 in compensation for "injury to feelings". Eddie Stobart, he said, "failed" to take her concerns about her rights as a pregnant worker seriously.
In a written judgement, employment judge Neilson said: "It is understandable that she would experience a degree of upset at the failure, as she saw it, of the respondent to seriously consider her case. It is an important right that employees have to have due consideration given by their employer to any grievance raised."
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