untitled

374 Chapter 13Employment (1): The contract of employment, employment rights and dismissal

employee, the employer should ask whether the time had arrived when the employer could

no longer reasonably be expected to keep the employee’s job open for him. This would

require examination of matters such as: the length of employment, the nature of the job, the

length and nature of the illness, the need for the job to be done, whether wages continued

to be paid and whether the employer could reasonably be expected to wait any longer.

A person on a fixed term contract who is dismissed when the contract ends is not wrong-

fully dismissed. (He could, however, have been unfairly dismissed.)

Wrongful dismissal is not a great deal of use to many employees because their notice

entitlement is not long enough to result in large damages. It can be very useful to those who

are highly paid and who are entitled to long periods of notice.

In Shove v Downs Surgical plc (1984), for example, a chairman of a company had a con-

tract of employment which entitled him to 30 months’ notice. He was summarily dismissed

Figure 13.3An overview of wrongful dismissal