Considering mediation in the context of employment disputes

Speechly Bircam senior partner Alan Julyan recently authored this thoughtful article concerning mediation procedures for employment disputes. Julyan claims that the take up of mediation in employment disputes lags behind its use in civil and commercial matters.

Julyan writes in part:

Ignorance of the process, and in particular its effectiveness and cost, is probably still one of the major factors inhibiting the growth of mediation in employment disputes. Although many more people are becoming involved in mediation, the lack of publicity about the successful outcome achieved by mediation obviously inhibits its growth as a means of resolving disputes and does little to dispel some of the ignorance of the process. Employees in particular fear that their employer will use mediation to gain information about their claim, cynically run up costs or, in fact, use the process to bully them into submission, or to use the process in order to demonstrate that it had been tried but have no real desire to resolve the dispute through mediation.