Morrisons’ workers left empty handed
Staff at supermarket chain Morrisons were left disappointed by the long-awaited Supreme Court ruling in the case of internal auditor Andrew Skelton, who went rogue and leaked the supermarket’s entire payroll data, including the personal data of around 100,000 workers, to an open access online forum. Skelton wanted to get back at his employer after being given a formal warning for using the Morrisons post-room for his eBay parcels. He executed the data dump at home on his personal computer on a Sunday, several weeks after secretly downloading the data at work onto a personal memory stick.
5,518 Morrisons staff brought a group action for breach of data protection law, privacy and confidentiality. Despite succeeding all the way to the Supreme Court, staff lost at the final hurdle when judges ruled that Morrisons was not vicariously liable because Skelton, a rogue employee motivated by a desire to harm his employer, was not acting in the course of his employment.
(Morrisons v Various Claimants [2020] UKSC 12)