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Access to justice: Law School employment dispute research part of EU-funded ETHOS Report

Press release issued: 3 May 2019

As part of the EU-funded ETHOS research project - which sets out to build knowledge around justice in Europe, raise awareness of impediments to justice, and provide guidelines for policies to prevent and reverse injustice - a recently published report, co-written by the Law School’s Professor Morag McDermont together with Dr Pier-Luc Dupont, Dr Eleanor Kirk and Professor Bridget Anderson, examines alternative employment dispute resolution in the UK.

The report, entitled ‘Promoting access to injustice? Alternative dispute resolution and employment relations in the UK’, was written by Dr Pier-Luc Dupont (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol), Dr Eleanor Kirk (School of Law, University of Glasgow), Professor Morag McDermont, and Professor Bridget Anderson (SPAIS).

Using data from a research programme led by Morag McDermont from 2012-2016 concerning the experiences of research participants who cannot easily afford to pay for legal advice pursuing employment disputes, the report makes important observations concerning the limitations of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in this field.

The report looks at how UK workers and employers are often encouraged to use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms rather than Employment Tribunals (ETs) to settle conflicts, and “unpacks the implications of the shift from judicial to extra-judicial dispute resolution for workers’ capacity to contest power inequalities and exercise their rights.”

The report was published as part of a European Union funded research project called ETHOS -Towards a European THeory Of juStice and fairness. The project is a collaboration running from January 2017 – December 2019 between six research institutions in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, the UK and Turkey.

As set out on the Migrations Mobilities Bristol ETHOS page, the project explores how justice is understood theoretically and experienced in practice:

“‘Justice’ is a word that is widely used in politics and policies in many different countries and also in the European Union itself. We are interested in uncovering what different people ­- activists, policymakers, professionals, the person on the street – mean by ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ to better understand the possibilities of justice, and also why for some people it seems so difficult to achieve.

The study will inform a wide range of stakeholders (including, but not restricted to policymakers) about different understandings and experiences of justice with a view to supporting attempts to reverse inequalities and to promote justice.”

Read the full report online.

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