Free Employment Advice - Stress: Duty of Care Owed: Workload

S claimed compensation from her employers for work-related stress. She had a history of depression and had been promoted a number of times. She was appointed operations manager for Cambridgeshire. This involved managing a large number of team managers, attending meetings and carrying out project work.

S complained to her employers about her long hours and heavy workload. The employers restructured her post and her workload was reduced. S then unsuccessfully applied for a new position. She claimed that her manager had been partly responsible for this because he had not given her a positive reference.

S was occasionally upset and tearful. She complained about her manager’s attitude to her and she started a grievance procedure. Steps were taken to resolve the grievance. S had taken time off work but had not told her employers the true nature of her illness. Two of her colleagues knew that she had been taking anti-depressant medication. S’s employment was terminated on grounds of ill-health. The following points were submitted on behalf of S:

• Her employers should have foreseen the risk of psychiatric illness because the risk factors for work-related stress had been present. Published material showed that work-related stress could lead to such illness.

• The employers had been in breach of its duty because they had failed to reduce the workload, deal with the relationship with her manager, carry out a risk assessment, manage her change of role, comply with the working time period of 48 hours, and had also breached the implied contractual duty of trust and confidence.

• The employers were in breach of statutory duty by failing to ensure that she had not worked regularly more than 48 hours a week, as required by the Working Time Regulations 1998, Regulation 4 and the Working Time Directive.

Decision:

1. The claim failed.

2. S’s workload, which was heavy, demanding and difficult, did not in itself make it reasonably foreseeable to her employer that she would suffer a psychiatric illness.

3. There had been no suggestion that the employer knew about S’s previous history of mental illness.

4. Although a general awareness of the risks of work-related stress could make it more likely that the risk to an individual was foreseeable, that general awareness did not in itself make psychiatric illness caused by overwork foreseeable in a particular individual.

5. The employer had not been in breach of its duty to act. Even if S’s illness had been caused by overwork, the employer had discharged its duty by reducing her workload as a result of restructuring.

6. There was no evidence that a risk assessment would have prevented S’s illness.

1. In relation to the Working Time Regulations, S had not worked significantly in excess of the 48 hour limit and would have difficulty in establishing that that was causative.

2. The claim for breach of the implied contractual duty of mutual trust and confidence did not add anything and would fail because of lack of foreseeability.