by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

An impressive tome has just landed on my desk: the collected results of the DTI’s 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey.

In the inimitable Panglossian style of our finest civil servants, it paints a picture of private enterprise gradually seeing the light and adopting the enlightened workplace practices of the public sector.

The use of performance appraisals, it reveals, is on the increase, with 78 per cent of managers now using them, up from 73 per cent in 1998.

Better still, 73 per cent of workplaces have adopted equal opportunities policies, up from just 64 per cent in 1998.

Many more are developing employment policies on religion, sexual orientation and age. “We have long argued that flexible working opportunities benefit everyone: employers, employees and their families,” beams employment minister Gerry Sutcliffe, “and today’s findings show that these arguments have been embraced in the modern workplace.”

What a happy country indeed, where crusty old managers in the private sector, so used to patronising their staff and treating them in an offhand way, finally realise the importance of lesbian awareness.

How reassuring it must be to know that when you apply for a job as a welder at Joe Bloggs’ garage in future you will have the reassurance of being able to read Mr Bloggs’ personal philosophy on the world’s religions.

Or perhaps not. Anyone deluded into believing the DTI’s assertion that businesses are discovering equal opportunities policies and the like out of enlightened self-interest should read on.

The report’s most revealing, and extremely shocking, statistic is that last year eight per cent of workplaces reported that they had been dragged through an employment tribunal by a disgruntled former member of staff.

Never mind all the policies on sex, race, age and so on, the number is rapidly growing.

Businesses aren’t spending valuable time writing up gender policies and performance appraisals because it helps their businesses: they are doing so because they are scared of being stung for thousands of pounds by exemployees with often spurious claims of bullying and unfair dismissal.

The one-sided nature of employment tribunals, and the increasing difficulty in avoiding them, is described by the owner of a chain of coffee shops.

“One girl in a shop of ours was stealing from us,” he says.

“We knew it was her. We tracked the transactions in her till and kept seeing money going missing. At the end of one shift, when £50 went missing, we sat her down and asked her about it.

"Instead of dealing with the evidence against her, she claimed that the case was racially motivated and sought help from the Citizens Advice Bureau. As her employer we were blocked by the bureau from answering her discrimination claims and setting the record straight before the matter reached an employment tribunal.

"We had no protection from what we knew were fictitious claims. So many businesses are in the same boat. They end up paying staff to leave rather than risking being called to a tribunal.”

Another employee punched a female colleague in the face, surely as clear a sacking offence as ever was.

But not in the current climate: the employee managed to escape punishment by going to a tribunal and claiming he had been “under stress”. Poor chap.

It rather raises the question of what an employee has to do these days to be sacked without an employment tribunal awarding generous damages. Murder the boss? Transfer thousands of pounds into an offshore bank account and do a runner?

No, perhaps there is only one way: failing to act in accordance with a race or gender equality policy.

It reminds me of a TV documentary during the early 1990s recession which followed a dozen hopefuls as they applied for a single vacancy as a dustman somewhere in greater Manchester.

Among the applicants was a single, very bright black gentleman. He sailed through the application procedure – until, that is, he was suddenly eliminated. The council explained that they couldn’t possibly employ him, not when he had failed to fill in his questionnaire on racial relations awareness.