Can you sack someone for racist rioting?

Can employers act if a worker's nicked for taking part in a racist riot? Sure you can!

But it depends if there’s a link between them and their workplace that members of the public can see easily. The best example is that the employee has put information about where they work on social media profiles (eg LinkedIn) because then the employer can argue that it's potentially damaging to the company's reputation.

This extends to people posting offensive comments on social media sites, if they have job information easily available to connect them to the employer. Having a clause in their employment contract and/ or social media policy in place makes this a completely solid way to take any disciplinary action too (depending on the circumstances).

As with any other potential problem, you need to hold a disciplinary and use a fair process. So the best approach is:

• Suspend them from work (on full pay because otherwise you’re pre-judging the outcome)
• Investigate: put the allegation to them and consider what they say (including if they’re in prison)
• Hold a disciplinary meeting and give them a chance to set out any reasons, defence or mitigation for the incident
• And then, if you want to, fire them for gross misconduct – if the resulting publicity has damaged, or has the potential to damage, the company.

Currently people are being arrested and sentenced quickly. If the employee has been kept in custody and then sent to prison, you can terminate their employment too. You should still use a fair process, which would be a disciplinary, because there’s a risk that if you rush to fire someone without hearing their side of events, then you might face an unfair dismissal claim.

The key case is Harvey v Vista Hotels where an employee jailed for 18 months was fired, but won an unfair dismissal claim. A short period with a disciplinary process could have avoided that. So you might have to find ways to investigate and hold a disciplinary involving an employee who’s in prison – but there’s always a way and it’s better than having it backfire on you by acting too quickly!

Hopefully this isn’t relevant to you and all your employees are lovely people who would never get caught up in racist rioting or being the sort of idiots we’ve all seen looting Greggs and Lush.

But as we keep being asked the question and seeing some absolute nonsense about this on social media (especially Facebook and X / Twitter), we thought we’d set out some quick advice.