Mr M Horgan v Represented by: Mr M McLaughlin - Solicitor Chevron Transport Corporation Limited — 2022

The claimant had been employed by Chevron since September 2006 and, after work in Angola, Nigeria, London and California, was assigned to Glasgow from August 2019 as a Nautical Instructor. The tribunal found that the Glasgow assignment was for 17 months by the time of dismissal, that he had a flat in Glasgow for the duration of the assignment, and that he was expected to perform his work from the respondent’s Clydebank learning and development centre, subject only to disruption caused by the covid pandemic.

The respondent argued that the claimant was an expatriate employee with only a weak connection to Great Britain, pointing to his Irish residence, overseas career, US-dollar pay, and the fact that he was repatriated to Cork shortly before termination. The tribunal accepted that the claimant was not recruited in Great Britain and had worked mostly outside Great Britain over his career, but it did not accept that he should be treated as an expatriate for territorial jurisdiction purposes. It also found that the temporary label on the Glasgow assignment was not decisive and that the claimant’s departure from Glasgow shortly before the end of employment was not, on its own, enough to defeat jurisdiction.

Applying the Lawson, Duncombe, Ravat and related authorities, the tribunal concluded that the claimant’s employment had a sufficiently strong connection with Great Britain and British employment law to justify the application of the unfair dismissal provisions. It placed weight on the fact that the work from which he was dismissed was carried out in Glasgow, that his day-to-day HR contact was based in Glasgow, and that the claimant would have been required to work there but for the pandemic. It therefore held that it had territorial jurisdiction to consider the claim of unfair dismissal under sections 94(1) and 103A of the Employment Rights Act 1996. No monetary remedy was awarded in this preliminary judgment.