In this month’s brief, Ian Smith shines the spotlight on some age-old ambiguities
- Construing the contract in a ‘Wages Act’ claim.
- Appeals where the tribunal papers are not actually received.
- ‘Giving notice’ can be ambiguous.
In the last month, the Court of Appeal has handed down two judgments settling points of controversy in areas of employment law:
- as to substance, whether a tribunal in determining a ‘Wages Act’ claim for unlawful deductions can if necessary construe/interpret the claimant’s contract of employment in order to determine what was ‘properly payable’; and
- as to procedure, how to deal with a case where the losing party in a tribunal fails to appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) within the tight deadline of 42 days because he or she has not actually received the relevant documentation from the tribunal.
On a common-sense basis, it may be that the answers to these questions should be obvious but, as we shall see, the issues are not so simple, to the extent that in the second, although the court was unanimous in the result, it split
