Retaliation is adverse treatment of someone because they raised a concern or complaint at work. It can come from a manager or a colleague, and ranges from dismissal to quieter forms such as exclusion or a poor reference.
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An analyst raises a concern about a supplier's invoices in March. In April her rating drops from exceeds to needs improvement, with no new evidence. By July she is off the account and the promotion round passes her by.
After a nurse reports a colleague's drug error, the ward group chat goes quiet when she joins. Handover starts before her shift does. Nobody is disciplined, nothing is written down, and within a year she asks to transfer.
A contractor flags a safety defect to the site manager. Two weeks later the agency says the client no longer needs him, with no reason given. Under the EU Directive, not renewing a temporary contract is on the list of retaliation.
Section 47B of the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives a worker the right not to be subjected to any detriment by any act, or any deliberate failure to act, by the employer on the ground that they made a protected disclosure. A detriment by a colleague counts as the employer's, with a defence if it took all reasonable steps. Dismissing an employee for that reason is automatically unfair and compensation is uncapped. A complaint of discrimination or harassment is protected separately: subjecting someone to a detriment because of it is victimization under section 27 of the Equality Act 2010.
Directive 2019/1937 defines retaliation as any direct or indirect act or omission in a work-related context, prompted by a report, which causes or may cause unjustified detriment to the reporting person. Article 19 lists fifteen forms, from dismissal to psychiatric or medical referrals. Under Article 21(5), once a reporter shows a detriment, it is presumed to be retaliation and the person who took the measure must prove duly justified grounds.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration defines retaliation as an employer firing an employee or taking any other adverse action against them for engaging in protected activity. In Murray v. UBS, decided 8 February 2024, the Supreme Court held that a Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower need only show the report was a contributing factor; the employer must then prove by clear and convincing evidence it would have acted the same way.
Retaliation is prevented by controlling who knows the reporter's name and by looking for it afterwards, not by prohibiting it in a policy.
Book a demoAnyone named in a report, and their reporting line, cannot see it, cannot be assigned to it and is not told who made it. The reflex to retaliate needs a name.
When the report arrives, ask who will work out that this person reported and what they could do about it, and let the answer decide who is told what and when.
At set intervals after the report, someone asks the reporter whether anything about their work has changed, and records the answer. Retaliation builds over months, and the check-in catches it while it can still be reversed.
A complaint of retaliation is a new case, handled by someone outside the original one and reported to the board beside every other category. Nobody uses a route that produced the retaliation.