Contracts of employment

Riders for Deliveroo are not in an ‘employment relationship’ for the purposes of European law such as to enable them to seek compulsory union recognition.

A contractual clause requiring an employee who had given notice to repay a discretionary bonus was not a restraint of trade, and the employer was entitled to rely on it and receive the repayment.

An employee’s contract had been terminated by the employer’s unilateral imposition of new terms and conditions.

An employer was liable to pay the level of income protection payments set out in an offer letter and summary of benefits provided by the employee’s original employer prior to a TUPE transfer, even though those benefits were no longer covered under the employer’s insurance policy.

An employer was entitled to dismiss and offer to re-engage employees on new terms (fire and rehire) to remove pay protection it had originally referred to as ‘permanent’. An earlier injunction preventing it from doing so was overturned.

Where an employee resigns and the employer brings forward the termination date by exercising its right to make a contractual payment in lieu of notice, there is no dismissal.

An ‘irreducible minimum of obligation’ is not a prerequisite of ‘worker’ status. Such a status will exist when an individual undertakes to do work personally for someone who isn’t a client or customer.

An employee could not make a claim for an unlawful deduction/underpayment of wages where he took up a more senior position but did not receive a contractual salary increase.

Owner-driver franchisees who carried out delivery and collection services for DPD were neither employees nor workers.

A delivery courier was a ‘worker’ despite his agreement containing what purported to be a substitution clause.

Drivers for Uber are workers and therefore entitled to paid holiday, minimum wage and rest breaks.

For the purposes of a constructive dismissal claim, an employee did not affirm his contract by engaging in his employer’s grievance procedure.

An employee’s failure to return to work after her maternity leave amounted to acceptance of a repudiatory breach for the purposes of an unfair constructive dismissal claim.

The ECJ has held that a courier appeared to have been correctly classified as self- employed rather than as a worker, given his independence and the lack of subordination.

An employee was rightly compensated for loss of entitlement to benefits under a PHI policy when he was unable to ‘return to work’ following sickness absence. The ‘return to work’ was a return to the work he had been doing when he went off sick, not a return to any work.

A suspended employee successfully obtained an injunction against her employer allowing her to resume most of her duties because there was no justification to restrict such duties.

There is no implied term that salary details are confidential.

Suspending an employee accused of gross misconduct breached the implied term of trust and confidence leading to an unfair constructive dismissal and if an employer wants to argue that the employee has been dismissed for a fair reason, they must specifically set this out in their defence.

An employee had accepted, by her subsequent conduct, collectively agreed changes to pay and holiday arrangements that had been in place for several years.

While at first blush a post-termination restriction was too broad and therefore unenforceable, the offending words in the clause could be removed to render the remainder of the clause enforceable.