Employment Relationship in UK Law

The trust and confidence required in the employment relationship can be undermined by an employer, or indeed an employee, in many different ways. The conduct must, of course, impinge on the relationship in the sense that, looked at objectively, it is likely to destroy or seriously damage the degree of trust and confidence the employee is reasonably entitled to have in his employer.

It is a non sequitur to say that because an employer is under a duty to an employee not to cause him physical injury, the employer should as a necessary consequence of that duty (of which there is no breach) be under a duty not to cause the employee psychiatric injury: see Hilson, Nervous Shock and Categorization of Victims, [1998] Tort L.R. 37, at 42. The rules to be applied when an employee brings an action against his employer for harm suffered at his workplace are the rules of tort.

There must be a reason why, if the employee would otherwise have been regarded as a secondary victim, the employment relationship should require him to be treated as a primary one. The employee in to Walker v. Northumberland County Council [1995] 1 All E.R. 737 was in no sense a secondary victim. His mental breakdown was caused by the strain of doing the work which his employer had required him to do.

On the other hand it is now established that the repudiatory conduct may consist of a series of acts or incidents, some of them perhaps quite trivial, which cumulatively amount to a repudiatory breach of the implied term of the contract of employment that the employer will not, without reasonable and proper cause, conduct himself in a manner calculated or likely to destroy or seriously damage the relationship of confidence and trust between employer and employee: see Woods v. W.M.Car Services (Peterborough) Ltd. [1981] ICR 666 in the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

(c) The breach of this implied obligation of trust and confidence may consist of a series of actions on the part of the employer which cumulatively amount to a breach of the term, though each individual incident may not do so. In particular in such a case the last action of the employer which leads to the employee leaving need not itself be a breach of contract; the question is, does the cumulative series of acts taken together amount to a breach of the implied term?

By "irrationality" I mean what can by now be succinctly referred to as "Wednesbury unreasonableness" ( Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd. v. Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 K.B. 223). It applies to a decision which is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.

The performance of an act, in this case the presentation of a complaint, is not reasonably practicable if there is some impediment which reasonably prevents, or interferes with, or inhibits, such performance.