Employment Tribunals and size of firm
As reported last year, Paul Edwards and Sukanya Sen-Gupta are working with David Storey and
George Saridakis of WBS’s Centre for Small and Medium-sized Enterprise on a DTI-funded
study of small firms’ experience of Employment Tribunals. The research, which was covered in
a piece in the Financial Times and which also won a prize at the Institute for Small Business and
Entrepreneurship conference, assessed small firms’ relative risk of entering the ET process, their
relative chances of success, and influences on their success rate. It found that they are more
likely to lose ETs but that this was largely due to the extent to which they not only had
disciplinary procedures but used them effectively. An academic paper is under review with a
journal.