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Now In: Contracts of employment > Express and implied contract terms
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To what extent are the terms of a contract binding?

What are incorporated terms and are they legally binding?

What are the risks of offering discretionary terms?

When are implied terms important?

Can an employer require its employees to give more notice to terminate their contracts than it is required to give?

If an employee receives a payment in lieu of notice, will his or her annual leave entitlement accrue up to the termination date, or the end of the notice period?

Is an employer liable for offensive and/or potentially discriminatory material or comments posted on its intranet bulletin board?

What contractual terms will exist between an employer and its employees with regard to health and safety?

In the absence of an express contractual term, if employees have always been permitted to smoke at work might they have an implied right to do so?

Can an employer require employees to live within a certain distance of the workplace?

Where an employer has provided employees with a Christmas hamper in previous years is it under any obligation to continue this practice?

Where an employee is put on garden leave, is the employer entitled to ask the employee to return his or her company car and mobile phone?

Where the transferor paid a particular mileage rate to transferred employees, is the transferee obliged to continue to pay them at this rate even though it is higher than its normal rate?

If an employer's business is closed because of, for example, flooding, is it obliged to pay its employees?

If an employer temporarily has to close its business premises at short notice because of unforeseen circumstances such as flooding, fire or a power supply failure, and there is no work available for its employees as a result, this will result in a period of lay-off. Unless there is a contractual right to lay employees off without pay, or employees expressly consent to being laid off without pay, they will be entitled to receive their normal pay for the duration of the lay-off. If the employer fails to pay employees they may sue for damages, or claim unfair constructive dismissal (if they resign as a result of the non-payment) on the ground that there has been a fundamental breach of the contract of employment. Employees may also claim that the employer has made unauthorised deductions from wages.

Even where an employee's contract of employment contains an express contractual right for the employer to impose a period of lay-off without pay, or the employee consents to a period of lay-off without pay, he or she is, subject to certain exceptions, entitled to a statutory guarantee payment for any complete day of lay-off. Guarantee payments are limited to a maximum of five days' payment in any three-month period. If the employee is normally required to work fewer than five days a week, the entitlement cannot exceed the number of days that he or she is required to work per week under the contract. The amount of guarantee payment per day is based on the employee's normal daily rate of pay, but subject to a statutory maximum.

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