Contracts of employment

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.

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.

Overturning the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court has held (by a majority) that an employee cannot bring a breach of contract claim for losses flowing from the manner of dismissal even where the dismissal is in breach of an express contractual disciplinary procedure. The statutory unfair dismissal regime is intended to cover everything to do with the dismissal process – any free-standing claim can only arise out of a genuinely free-standing issue.

A persistent and deliberate refusal to comply with a reasonable management instruction, after warnings were given, was gross misconduct justifying summary dismissal – no matter how sincerely the principle behind that refusal may have been held.

An employer didn’t act unfairly when, after failing to negotiate changes to terms and conditions (which included an offer to ‘buy out’ the bonus scheme), it terminated employee contracts and offered to re-employ the staff on new terms which didn’t include the buy-out payment. The employer had acted in the reasonable and honest belief that this approach would achieve the legitimate and reasonable aim of cutting costs.