An employee was employed under a contract of employment for 2 years with a waiver clause. 5 weeks before the end of that period the employer wrote to the employee, extending her contract by nearly 4 months and specifying that all other conditions of the contract were to remain.
Held: ‘In many cases the correct answer may be reached by applying the ‘Denning test’, but if as in this case, an unfair and unreasonable result is produced one must go back and ask the allegedly more difficult question : was the second contract an extension of the first?’ If an employer became liable to make an unfair dismissal payment by extending for a short period a contract under which the employee had surrendered her compensation rights would be a conclusion which would be: ‘irrational, unjust and contrary to the clear contractual terms into which the parties had chosen to enter.’ Sir Brian Hutton LCJ: it was clear as a matter of construction that the employee was not employed under a new and separate contract when the original contract was extended but that she was employed under a contract for a fixed term of two years which was extended or renewed to make it a fixed term of two years, three months and three weeks. It was unreasonable and unjust to hold that because of the extension the employer lost the benefit of the exclusion clause which would have operated to protect it if the employment had ended on the expiry of the term of two years.
Judges:
MacDermott LJ, Sir Brian Hutton LCJ
Citations:
[1993] IRLR 545
Jurisdiction:
Northern Ireland
Citing:
Cited – BBC v Ioannou CA 1975
Mr I was employed on a 3-year contract determinable on notice. The contract was renewed by a 2-year extension, followed by a one-year extension, and a waiver clause was agreed for the latter extension. The statute required the fixed term to be of . .
Cited by:
Cited – British Broadcasting Corporation v Kelly-Phillips CA 24-Apr-1998
When a one year fixed term employment contract was extended by a period of less than a year, but then not again renewed, there was no unfair dismissal, since the exemption for the original term applied also to any extension. There had been . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Employment, Northern Ireland
Updated: 16 May 2022; Ref: scu.198055