Employment Rights in UK Law

Putting the question in the traditional terms of the conflict of laws, what connection between Great Britain and the employment relationship is required to make section 94(1) the appropriate choice of law in deciding whether and in what circumstances an employee can complain that his dismissal was unfair?

But there are some circumstances where a worker works intermittently for the employer, perhaps as and when work is available. There is in principle no reason why the worker should not be employed under a contract of employment for each separate engagement, even if of short duration, as a number of authorities have confirmed: see the decisions of the Court of Appeal in Meechan v Secretary of State for Employment [1997] IRLR 353 and Cornwall County Council v Prater [2006] IRLR 362.

If the tribunal concludes that the contract is not a sham, it is likely to wish to consider next whether the contract, which may well have been labelled a contract of employment, actually gave rise to an employer/employee relationship. This is not the same question as that relating to whether there is a controlling shareholding. This is not the same question as that relating to whether there is a controlling shareholding.

Of course, it is important that the Industrial Tribunal should be alert in this area of the law to look at the reality of any obligations. If there is a term that is inherently inconsistent with the existence of a contract of employment, what actually happened from time to time may not be decisive, given the existence of that term.

If theemployer is guilty of conduct which is a significant breach going to the root of the contract of employment; or which shows that the employer no longer intends to be bound by one or more of the essential terms of the contract; then the employee is entitled to treat himself as discharged from any further performance. If he does so, then he terminates the contract by reason of the employer's conduct.

Mr Cavanagh said that some lack of legal certainty was inevitable, given that the time limit ran not from the date of the breach or from loss sustained as a result of it but from the end of the employment. He gave various examples of how uncertainty could arise even on the respondents' interpretation of section 2(4). I think that on balance greater uncertainty is likely to be produced by the appellants' interpretation of it.

If a person in the hierarchy of responsibility above the employee (here Mr Widmer as Ms Jhuti's line manager) determines that, for reason A (here the making of protected disclosures), the employee should be dismissed but that reason A should be hidden behind an invented reason B which the decision-maker adopts (here inadequate performance), it is the court's duty to penetrate through the invention rather than to allow it also to infect its own determination.