Time To Review Your Contracts Of Employment
With everything else happening in the country at present it is not surprising employers are putting off paperwork exercises like reviewing their contracts of employment. This is a great pity because the number of employers seeking to restructure their staff, make redundancies or wanting to put staff on short time is still rising. Why does the contract matter in such situations? Surely the action needed is obvious without worrying about such documents?
If the employer does not have a correctly worded contract of employment allowing them to introduce short time working then the employees may be able to make it very difficult - even stop short-time working. After the changes due in April it is possible that an employer, although complying with the new ACAS guidelines, may be in breach of their own contracts; imagine being legal but being taken to Employment Tribunal for breach of an out of date document!
At the moment I have more Tribunal claims on my desk than I handled in the whole of last year. Two which arrived last Friday are for over £40,000 each, enough to put the employers concerned out of business. These two, like most of the others, are based on the employee saying that the employer’s procedure did not comply with the statutory minimum. The paperwork to provide proof the employer did act correctly is all-important, and this starts with the contract. All the contract revisions we are carrying out at present will incorporate a new-style clause stating the employee has a legal obligation to try and resolve any dispute in-house before going to Employment Tribunal. We are doing this in an extremely clear and open way. If an employee files at Tribunal without attempting to settle the matter internally first, then this clause would give the employer the opportunity to file a claim for his costs against the employee under breach of contract. Naturally we will not know if such a clause would ever stand up in court until it is tested, but we hope in the future it will be a deterrent against employees making wild claims with no chance of success, in the hope of an out of court settlement.
If the employer does not have a correctly worded contract of employment allowing them to introduce short time working then the employees may be able to make it very difficult - even stop short-time working. After the changes due in April it is possible that an employer, although complying with the new ACAS guidelines, may be in breach of their own contracts; imagine being legal but being taken to Employment Tribunal for breach of an out of date document!
At the moment I have more Tribunal claims on my desk than I handled in the whole of last year. Two which arrived last Friday are for over £40,000 each, enough to put the employers concerned out of business. These two, like most of the others, are based on the employee saying that the employer’s procedure did not comply with the statutory minimum. The paperwork to provide proof the employer did act correctly is all-important, and this starts with the contract. All the contract revisions we are carrying out at present will incorporate a new-style clause stating the employee has a legal obligation to try and resolve any dispute in-house before going to Employment Tribunal. We are doing this in an extremely clear and open way. If an employee files at Tribunal without attempting to settle the matter internally first, then this clause would give the employer the opportunity to file a claim for his costs against the employee under breach of contract. Naturally we will not know if such a clause would ever stand up in court until it is tested, but we hope in the future it will be a deterrent against employees making wild claims with no chance of success, in the hope of an out of court settlement.
Posted by Peter Abraham
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