- Quantum meruit not enforceable in an employment tribunal.
- Worker definition—the professional or business undertaking element.
- Definition of working time—meaning of ‘working time’.
Many years ago, in the early years of our then membership of what became the EU when EU law started to flow up the estuaries and into the rivers (per Lord Denning), your humble author attended a conference to introduce English lawyers into the mysteries of this new legal regime. One of the speakers was the president of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) who was giving a lecture on the novel concept of direct effect of directives and why they bound national governments which could not benefit from their own failure to transpose them. Perhaps due to baffled looks in the audience, this very learned judge tried a domestic analogy. He said: ‘It is like your own concept of estoppel,’ at which a hundred English lawyers’ heads slumped into their hands with a collective ‘Oh s**t’.
