Collective Agreement in UK Law

On the question of construction, as Mr Brennan acknowledged, where a contract of employment expressly incorporates an instrument such as a collective agreement or staff handbook, it does not necessarily follow that all the provisions in that instrument or document are apt to be terms of the contract.

To be liable for inducing breach of contract, you must know that you are inducing a breach of contract. It is not enough that you know that you are procuring an act which, as a matter of law or construction of the contract, is a breach. Nor does it matter that you ought reasonably to have done so. He took the information in the honest belief that the employee would not be in breach of contract.

But, again, that passage needs to be read in the context of the fact that in that case the variation had not yet bitten, and I do not think that the difficulty in identifying the precise moment at which an employee should be treated as first accepting a contractual pay-cut means that the question has to be answered once and for all at the point of implementation.

, but in fact the income account includes not only contributions to the Welfare Fund but also the contributions payable for crew membership of the Special Seafarers' Section.

A law or policy should be sufficiently clear to enable those affected by it to regulate their conduct i.e. to avoid being misled. Such a law or policy should also be sufficiently clear so as to obviate the risk that a public authority can act in an arbitrary way which interferes with fundamental rights of an individual.

The devising of a statutory scheme of recognition inevitably requires a large number of detailed choices about both substantive and procedural matters, seeking, as Mr Stilitz put it, to There will inevitably be some choices which not only could have been made differently but could have been made better.

All that said, however, I remain anxious about the fact that we are being asked to decide an issue which is likely to affect a large number of people who will have had no say in our decision. It is plain that the company is going to make a substantial number of people redundant. If such people are made redundant, they may well seek redress from an ET on the basis that their dismissals were unfair.