WHSmith have been ordered to pay out a large sum of compensation to a woman who was forced to work on weekends, and to bring her daughter with her.
A WHSmith worker has won more than £25,000 after she was forced to bring her daughter to her shift as her manager made her work on Saturdays.
But her ‘frustrated’ boss told her she had to work a four hour shift on a Saturday and find her own replacement if she could not do it, an employment tribunal was told.And she has now been awarded £25,558.55 in compensation after the panel found that forcing women, as primary caregivers, to work on Saturdays put them at a disadvantage.
Then, in July 2018, her boss – named in tribunal documents only as Mr Cruikshank – introduced a Saturday rota for weekday staff to work one weekend day a month.This was to combat falling sales revenue and came after university students who usually covered the weekend had quit, the tribunal heard. The tribunal was told she tried to talk to her boss multiple times about this, even sending him a text which was ignored.