Employment law needs urgent revision

EMPLOYMENT LAWS NEED URGENT REVIEW

There have been a lot of calls lately for the government to review the Employment Act 1993. Experts have criticized this law as being inadequate and unfair to workers who are sacked from their employment through no fault of their own.

Although the law has been challenged on several occasions by lawyers for its inadequacies, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that in a situation where a worker’s employment has been terminated unlawfully through no fault of his own, the worker is only entitled to one day’s pay for each month that he has worked in accordance with the Act. The worker is thus not able to file a case before the Courts to seek moral damages which would have been substantially more than what the Act provides. This is because the Act itself prevents the Court from compensating an aggrieved person by way of an award for moral damages and this has caused a grave injustice to the workers.

In a series of cases brought before the Supreme Court by workers who find themselves in this predicament, the Court has consistently ruled that unless the Employer commits a “tort” such as an assault on the Employee, the Employee cannot claim any damages in addition to what has already been provided for under the Act, which is negligible by all accounts. For a government who claims to champion the cause of the workers, it is unfortunate that the government has not taken any steps whatsoever to cure this lacuna in the law to the detriment of the workers.

The following case illustrates the point made in this article. An Air Seychelles stewardess who was summarily dismissed from her employment by Air Seychelles after many years of loyal service filed a case at the Ministry of Employment claiming unlawful dismissal and asked the Employment Tribunal to make an order to reinstate her in her job. The Competent Officer ruled that Air Seychelles had acted unlawfully when they dismissed the girl and ordered reinstatement since the girl had already been paid all her dues under the Act by Air Seychelles.

Air Seychelles appealed to the Minister against the decision of the Competent Officer and the Minister dismissed the appeal and ruled in favour of the employee. Based on the outcome of the appeal, the girl then instructed lawyers to sue Air Seychelles for moral damages since she had done nothing wrong and the Minister had ruled that her dismissal was unlawful. Lawyers advised her that she was unlikely to win such a case as the Employment Act does not contain provisions which allow an employee in her situation to claim moral damages.

The end result is that an Employer can terminate the employment of any of its employee for whatever reason or for no reason at all as long as he pays the employee compensation provided for by the Act. This is why people are now calling for the Act to be amended to allow an employee to seek redress in Court by way of moral damages against an employer who has unlawfully terminated the employment of an employee.

One hopes that the government will pay heed to these calls and act swiftly to curtail this situation.