Case Digests

Employing someone on successive fixed-term contracts continually to cover for various other staff taking family leave did not, in itself, breach EU law on fixed-term work, even though this cover continued for many years. A temporary need to replace permanent staff can amount to an objective reason justifying the use of such successive fixed-term contracts but that is up to the national courts to decide.

The Court of Appeal stresses that whether an employer will be vicariously liable for one employee’s violent actions towards another employee depends on whether there is a sufficiently close connection between what the employee is actually required to do and the violent action. Only if such violence can truly be said to be ‘in the course of employment’ will an employer be liable.

A university sponsorship contract was not a contract of employment. A former apprentice who’d been sponsored by a company to do a degree had not been ‘dismissed’ when the company decided not to employ him when he withdrew from his course.

An employee’s resignation ‘with immediate effect’ meant what it said. Unless there was something to suggest that a ‘cooling off’ period was required and that the employee never actually intended to resign, nothing either party subsequently does can alter what in law was her effective date of termination.

A fairly standard indemnity in a compromise agreement did not oblige an employer to pay an ex-employee’s legal expenses associated with a criminal investigation into action allegedly taken by him when he was an employee.

An employer’s refusal to allow an employee, who would not opt out of a 48-hour week, to work overtime was not unreasonable. Its actions were necessary to comply with its duties under the Working Time Regulations (WTR). The employee had not been penalised nor had he suffered a detriment by refusing to sign the opt out.