TOM UTLEY: £15,000 for hurt feelings after being left out of a work WhatsApp group? I’d count it as a blessing!

How much are your feelings worth? I ask this because some people seem to be very pricey – and also extremely vulnerable.

So anyway, this week’s news shows that an employment tribunal has awarded a plumber £15,000 in damages for injury to his feelings after he was left out of a WhatsApp chat group at work while he was ill with a bad back.

The award was part of a £134,411 settlement awarded to 60-year-old Mark Brosnan by employment judge Sarah George, who ruled that his employers – Coalo, a facilities management company wholly owned by the London borough of Hounslow – ‘ had literally done nothing. to facilitate his return to work after his back problems.

He resigned from the company in December 2021, claiming (among other things) unfair dismissal. This week his claim was upheld at the hearing in Watford, Hertfordshire.

I note, by the way, that the judge only awarded Mr Brosnan £7,000 for damage to his back, which he allegedly suffered while working in a confined space and not being adequately trained.

This seems to indicate that his hurt feelings, amounting to €15,000, were more than twice as painful as his physical injuries.

As for that WhatsApp group, which was set up to pass on information to workers on matters such as health and safety, employment judge George said Mr Brosnan’s exclusion from the chat while he was ill was an “adverse act” which amounted to to discrimination on the grounds of disability.

“Some employers do not contact employees at all during sick leave, for fear of exacerbating their ill health or bothering them with work-related matters when they should be recovering,” she says.

‘But that cannot be assumed and in the absence of evidence from Coalo I am not convinced there was any justification for this.’

All I can say is that I must be an extremely insensitive brute, as I wouldn’t feel hurt at all – let alone worth £15,000 – if my employers excluded me from the messages they sent to all send staff. .

Now they bombard me daily with dozens of emails, most of which read “URGENT: LEGAL ALERT,” detailing the latest court orders, complaints to the press regulator, and pleas for privacy from celebrities I’ve never heard of.

Others inform me of the company’s support services, which are ready to protect my mental and physical well-being (lost causes, I fear, as I am a grumpy old so-and-so, with a deadly taste for alcohol and cigarettes ). The constant alerts on my smartphone drive me crazy.

I hasten to say that I don’t blame my bosses at the Mail. After all, the mainstream British press is about the most heavily regulated in the free world, and its publishers could undoubtedly find themselves in all kinds of legal trouble if they failed to keep their employees informed.

I also feel like I have to read every new message as soon as it arrives in my inbox, with the incredibly unlikely chance that one of those urgent alerts could be directly relevant to my work.

It doesn’t half hinder my concentration, I can tell you, as I lie on the couch at home, where I spend most of my life these days, struggling to remember if I took my blood pressure pill after lunch .

But if all these emails are annoying, I would find it even more annoying if my masters chose to communicate via a WhatsApp group. Because while emails just make a soft, thumping sound when they land in my inbox, my phone makes a piercing beep when a WhatsApp message arrives.

This invariably causes our dog to yap, as if she thinks aliens are invading. With every WhatsApp beep she bursts through the dog flap into the garden, barks her head off and enrages the neighbors.

In fact, I only stick to WhatsApp because it is our sons’ favorite way to send photos of our grandchildren and our neighbors’ forum for sharing tips on reliable traders or useful information of local interest.

Mr Brosnan may feel terribly hurt at being left out of his employers’ WhatsApp group. If something like that happened to me, I would consider it a blessing.

Mind you, this sensitive plumber is far from the only delicate soul to have enjoyed the strange windfall of an employment tribunal, for reasons some of us may find baffling.

Take the supermarket worker who won an £8,962.30 payout from Asda last month after one of her bosses left her ‘extremely upset’ when they told her to return to work from the quiet room where she was taking an extra break took. received permission from a manager because she was suffering from stress.

Or consider the £60,000 the taxpayer had to pay to four police officers who were ordered to shave off their beards.

They too would be ‘extremely appalled’, dear ones, by Police Scotland’s anti-beard policy, which has now inevitably been abandoned.

Or how about the female Defense Department police officer, fired for failing a fitness test, who won a sex discrimination case because of the “innate biological differences” between men and women?

For every successful plaintiff, others take their bosses to court on downright ridiculous grounds. Although these cases are often dismissed by tribunals, employers still incur endless hours of paperwork and costs that are rarely recoverable from the losing party.

Take the Polish delivery driver who was fired for stealing parcels from his employer and then charged with unfair dismissal when he was discovered.

Then there was the Chinese applicant who failed to get a job as a security guard – and promptly claimed £781,000 in damages, claiming racial discrimination during his job interview.

“I said I like table tennis, the most popular sport in China,” he said. “This recruitment management team has no intention of promoting diversity of cultures within the work environment.”

As for that excessive claim for compensation, he calculated it on the basis that he had been denied an income of £35,000 for 22 years until his proposed retirement at the age of 80!

Meanwhile, workers’ rights in this country are so entrenched that large numbers of civil servants and others are refusing to come to work and insisting on ‘working from home’, more than two years after the last lockdown was lifted.

What’s so astonishing is that there is apparently nothing that ministers or other employers can do, under the current law, to force the WFH crew to do their bit in the workplace. Given how heavy the law is on employers these days, I often wonder why anyone has trouble starting a business.

It is true that we can all see that the fate of employers, on whom our hopes for future prosperity absolutely depend, would become even more uncertain under Sir Keir Starmer.

After all, when the opposition leader announced his intention to keep Britain in line with Brussels law, he made no secret of the fact that he was thinking particularly about EU guarantees for workers’ rights.

But how can cases like Mr Brosnan’s continue to appear before employment tribunals, 13 years after a Tory-led government came to power and seven years after the country voted to break away from the EU’s hardened bureaucracy?

Rishi Sunak evoked the memory of the great Margaret Thatcher and linked her upbringing to his. This week he told the Tory conference: ‘This Conservative Party, the party of the grocer’s daughter and the pharmacist’s son, will always be the party of entrepreneurship. the party of small businesses.’

At the risk of hurting some feelings along the way, couldn’t he prove it by cutting his way through the jungle of red tape that costs taxpayers a fortune and holds back businesses?