Tribunal decides driver qualified as 'employee'
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Brian Preston v C W Griffiths & Sons
• LORRY DRIVER Brian Preston was awarded £3,315 compensation for unfair dismissal after a Hereford industrial tribunal, in a majority decision, decided that he was an "employee" of C W Griffiths & Sons for the required qualifying period of time.
Since June 1985 Preston, who had had his own haulage business, had driven occasionally for Griffiths, the tribunal was told. It worked out at fractionally more than one week a month until June 1986. In February 1986. Preston was obliged to sell his only vehicle, Thereafter, he still drove for Griffiths for one week in every four or six until May 1986, when he began driving full time on a self-employed basis In 1988 Mr C W Griffiths proposed that Preston be ''taken on the books", after taking advice from the Road Haulage Association. Preston was reluctant to change at first, but eventually agreed. Thereafter, he was treated like any other driver.
The tribunal said that the question was Preston's status between April 1986 and April 1988. In favour of the "employee" status during that period was that he was driving Griffith's lorry not his own, and that he did no other work. He was as much under the company's control as any other driver. He had no independent field of operations and he was fully integrated with the company's business.
Against "employee" status was the absence of a guaranteed week. The majority of the tribunal took the view that the change to full-time work in May 1986 altered Preston's status, particularly as he had by then sold his own vehicle.
VEHICLE TAKEN OFF ROAD Driver dismissed In December 1988 the company took Preston's vehicle off the road and dismissed him, ostensibly on redundancy grounds. Preston was not the latest employee to join the business. In August 1988 a driver had left and had immediately been replaced. That was indeed strange when the company was saying that there had been a 25% downturn in work since July 1988.
It was not necessary to sell the vehicle said the tribunal, and only one vehicle was delicensed. That was not 25% per cent of a fleet of eight. The company's explanation was that additional work had come along in January, but the tribunal was not satisfied, on balance, that the company had been moved by declining business to reduce the workforce by one and dismiss Preston in December.