Industrially Deducted

Spackman v London Metropolitan University (2007, IRLR 744)

Employers can make deductions from wages if they are authorised by provisions in the contract. In Spackman v London Metropolitan University (2007, IRLR 744), the county court said that the employer had been entitled to make a deduction as a result of the employee taking industrial action.

Basic facts

Ms Spackman was employed as a lecturer and personal academic adviser (PAA) to about 200 students. Her contract stated that if she took industrial action, she would not be paid, regardless of whether the action was all out or partial.

In May 2005 the union announced that negotiations over members’ conditions of employment had broken down and that it was left with no alternative but to take strike action. The university then e-mailed staff, telling them that it would deduct a full day’s pay from their salaries for every day of industrial action in which they were involved, whether they were on strike for the whole day or not.

Ms Spackman took part in continuous industrial action for five days and then supported a programme of non-strike action which mainly involved boycotting certain activities. The university docked her pay in full for the all out strike action and 30 per cent for the non strike action.

The claim

Ms Spackman claimed full reimbursement of the deduction made by the university for the non strike days. She said she had worked at least 40 hours a week, even during the periods of industrial action, and was therefore entitled to be paid her entire contractual salary.

She also argued (in the event that the court did not agree with her primary claim) that if the university had actually assessed the amount of work she had done on the non strike days (rather than impose a blanket amount), the deduction should not have exceeded five or ten per cent.

In particular, she said that she had undertaken most of her marking and assessing responsibilities (in breach of the union’s boycott call) so that when the action was called off, she was able to submit that material “at the press of a button.” And she had remained heavily involved in her PAA work (also in breach of the union’s instructions).

County court judgment

The county court, however, disagreed. It said that the university made it quite plain in its May 2005 e-mail that if staff did not work normally, they could expect a substantial reduction in pay. Just because the university did not lock its employees out, nor prevent them from doing other work, did not mean that it accepted that they were “performing” their contracts.

The court also rejected her secondary claim, pointing out that her contract expressly stated that if she took part in industrial action, “remuneration will cease”. Given that express clause, Ms Spackman would have to show that her contract had been varied but there was no evidence to sustain such a claim. Nor was there an implied term entitling her to payment.

But was she entitled to “quantum meruit”? In other words, to be paid for the value of the work she had done. Again, the country court rejected her arguments, saying that the “notion of an employee-by-employee entitlement to quantum meruit payment simply does not 'fit' with a context of collective mass industrial action by hundreds of employees ... Such action derives its force not from the partial withdrawal of labour by an individual worker but by virtue of the collective impact. Any assessment based strictly on a post-settlement retrospective quantification of the value … of the work actually undertaken by an individual employee wholly fails to address … the 'realities' of the situation.”

In case he was wrong on that point, the judge then estimated the value of her work to her employer at no higher than 50 per cent, which meant that her claim failed.