Employee Law

There are two important concepts to remember about modern UK employment law:

* statutory provisions take priority over common law terms and conditions in contracts of employment. This means that whatever may be expressly or impliedly agreed between parties to contracts of employment, the terms and conditions must conform to the requirements of statutory law. Therefore, parties to a contract of employment cannot agree a contract that purports to limit the operation of any provision of the Act: s.203, Employment Rights Act 1996. For example, an employee cannot agree to work for less than the National Minimum Wage or an employer cannot demand that an employee must agree to take less holiday leave than that to which he or she is statutorily entitled;

* the fairness of employment provisions, 'unfair dismissal,' are provisions which come under statute law and, that being so, are governed by the concept of 'reasonableness' and not the strict rules of the common law. For example, a contract of employment may state that the employer will dismiss an employee after giving the employee three disciplinary warnings. But, if an employer dismissed an employee for that reason, the employer would need to show that it had acted reasonably by so doing and could not rely just on the expressly stated common law term or condition of the contract. Similarly, an employee could not object to a the employer if the employer could show that it acted reasonably by varying the contract.

Full Article >>>