Employees' Access to Information
What is RSS?
Jun 2011If you are considering dismissing an employee for any reason, that employee is entitled to access information that is relevant to your decision.
This right is contained in section 4(1A)(c) of the Employment Relations Act. The Employment Court recently decided that this means access to all relevant information.
That case was The Vice-Chancellor of Massey University v Wrigley and Kelly. Mr Wrigley and Mr Kelly were made redundant. They successfully claimed that Massey University failed to provide them with all relevant information.
Where an employee is being assessed against his or her colleagues to decide who will stay and who will go, the employee is entitled to access:
- Selection criteria, including weighting if some criteria are more important than others;
- Your assessment of the employee against those criteria; and
- Your assessment of his or her colleagues, even though that is personal information about those other people.
Employees need to be given the opportunity to discuss these matters with you and to question your reasons before you make any final decision about who will be redundant.
In a redundancy situation all relevant information could also include alternative measures which you have considered and your reasons for rejecting those.
Where the reason for possible dismissal is not redundancy, you still need to provide all relevant information, for example what are the particular allegations of misconduct, and who says what about what happened. This needs to be provided in time for the employee to consider it before he or she is expected to respond with an explanation.
Failing to meet this important obligation is likely to make the dismissal unjustifiable, exposing you to a possible personal grievance. Let us know if you would like our help to meet your employer obligations.
Prepared by Lesley Brook
