Day 310 - 04 Dec 96 - Page 15
1 MR. RAMPTON: I have suggested that it probably did. I am
2 being a little -- what is the word -- cautious about all of
3 this because I am bound to say I find it very difficult to
4 see how these can be comments, and I -----
5
6 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You may be right. But I want to explore the
7 possibility.
8
9 MR. RAMPTON: Yes, I understand that. If you say the pay is
10 bad and it is a comment, people will merely think, when
11 they read it, that what you are saying is that, in your
12 opinion, the actual rate for the job is not very good, or
13 is low or is poor. They are not going to reflect upon it,
14 unless you tell them to do so, which this leaflet does not,
15 of other features in the pay structure, or which affect the
16 pay structure, which are not mentioned in the leaflet.
17
18 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I think the final general matter, and then I
19 will just see what specific matters I wanted to ask about
20 which I have not already covered, is: Suppose, at the end
21 of the day, I thought that bad pay was justified but bad
22 conditions were not. Suppose that were so.
23
24 MR. RAMPTON: Yes.
25
26 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Is the bad pay, would that be serious enough
27 to justify the lot?
28
29 MR. RAMPTON: No, quite plainly not. If your Lordship found,
30 as a matter of fact, that the pay was bad, for whatever
31 reasons, that would be effective to reduce the damages,
32 I do not know how much by, but it would for this particular
33 allegation; but given that conditions are of as much
34 importance to the ordinary person who works for anybody, or
35 almost as much importance, as the pay, that is an
36 allegation of equivalent seriousness. Add on to that the
37 allegation of getting rid of pro-union workers and the
38 exploitation of disadvantaged groups -----
39
40 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That I see, at the moment, as a separate
41 sting anyway.
42
43 MR. RAMPTON: I see. I thought, when you said "the whole lot",
44 you meant -----
45
46 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is quite true I did say "the whole lot".
47
48 MR. RAMPTON: I am sorry. That is my fault. I misunderstood.
49 No, even if you take those two bits in isolation, you could
50 not say, I would submit, that just because a company paid
51 bad wages but its conditions were OK or pretty good, you
52 could not say that the bad pay was overall a justification
53 of the sting that he was a bad employer, because there is a
54 significant residual damage in the unproved allegation that
55 the conditions are bad. So, section 5 does not work and
56 bad pay reflects only in a reduction of damages.
57
58 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is partly because I had that question in
59 mine that I wondered whether the overall sting was not the
60 combination of bad pay for bad conditions, as I said
