Mr Ross Murray v Wipro Limited — 2020

Mr Ross Murray was employed by WIPRO Limited from 4 July 2016 as a Transformation Director and was dismissed with effect from 19 February 2020 after a period on the bench. The tribunal found that Wipro’s business model required employees to bid for billable roles, but that the so-called bench process and any time limits leading to termination were not set out in the claimant’s contract or in any accessible policy. It accepted that the claimant’s capability was never in issue and that no alternative to dismissal was explored, including any referral to HR capability assessment or consideration of retraining.

On unfair dismissal, the tribunal held that the principal reason for dismissal was that the claimant was not working on a billable project. It rejected the respondent’s attempt to distinguish that reason from redundancy, and said that in the absence of any roles for a Band D1 employee the requirements of the business for work of that kind had diminished. It found the dismissal unfair because the respondent acted unreasonably in treating the absence of billable work as a sufficient reason for dismissal, and also because the procedure was unfair: there was no evidence of a proper pool or selection criteria, no investigation of alternatives, and no application of the respondent’s own process. The tribunal further said there was no evidential basis to reduce any compensatory award for the chance that the claimant would have been dismissed anyway had a fair procedure been followed.

The race discrimination claim was pursued as indirect discrimination under section 19 of the Equality Act 2010, with the claimant alleging that Wipro allocated work to Indian nationals or workers based on the Indian sub-continent in a way that disadvantaged white British or UK nationals. The tribunal considered the amended case and the examples said to support it, including Highland Council, Liverpool Victoria Insurance and National Grid. It found that the claimant had not been replaced by an Indian national on Liverpool Victoria or National Grid, that the National Grid assignment was taken by a Band C1 employee for cost reasons, and that there was no evidence the Highland Council account involved race discrimination. It therefore dismissed the race discrimination claim.