Claims under s.13 ERA 1996 for sums properly payable but not paid, and what counts as wages. Delaney v Staples; Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland v Agnew.
Wages; 'properly payable' (s.13(3) ERA 1996) and 'under his contract or otherwise' (s.27(1)). The majority of the Court of Appeal held that a sum is wages properly payable only where the worker has some legal, although not necessarily contractual, entitlement to it; a reasonable expectation of a discretionary payment is not enough. A window-cleaning team's share of a job's 'workbill' price, which no term fixed and which was not objectively ascertainable, was not wages properly payable, so a 10% cut in workbill prices was not an unlawful deduction. Kent Management Services v Butterfield, on discretionary commission, is to that extent no longer reliable. [Summary not yet checked against the judgment.]
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References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Contract; discretionary bonus; irrationality/perversity standard. An employer exercising an apparently unfettered contractual bonus discretion breaches the contract if it exercises it in a way no reasonable employer would. A nil award to a senior trader whose 'individual performance' — properly construed as trading profitability — had generated substantial profits was irrational, the decision having been infected by extraneous factors such as personal dislike and his impending departure; damages were assessed as the bonus a rational employer would have awarded. [Summary not yet checked against the judgment.]
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References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Unlawful deduction from wages; discretionary bonus; wages properly payable. Once an employer announces a bonus on stated terms and the employee acquires a legal entitlement to it, the bonus becomes 'wages properly payable' under s.13(3) ERA 1996. The employer cannot avoid liability by characterising the bonus as ad hoc or discretionary after the entitlement has arisen. [Summary not yet checked against the judgment.]
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References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Contract; discretionary bonus; Wednesbury standard; UCTA s.3. The Clark v Nomura irrationality standard governs bonus discretion, but the burden on the employee is very high — he must show that no rational bank in the City would have paid so little, and the court will not substitute its own view of his worth. UCTA 1977 s.3 gave no assistance: an employee deals with his employer neither as a consumer nor on the employer's 'written standard terms of business' in respect of remuneration for his services. [Summary not yet checked against the judgment.]
Cites
References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Holiday pay; unlawful deductions; series of deductions. A 'series' of deductions is not automatically broken by a gap of three months or more between underpayments, nor by an intervening lawful payment: whether deductions form a series is a question of fact, and underpayments linked by a common fault — here the systematic calculation of holiday pay at basic pay rather than normal pay — can constitute a series despite such gaps. Disapproves the three-month-gap rule derived from Bear Scotland v Fulton.
Cites
References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.
Unlawful deduction from wages; discretionary bonus; crystallisation. Once the designated approver (the Sector Lead) exercised the disclosed discretion to award the full 1% kitty bonus in accordance with the terms announced to staff, the claimant's entitlement crystallised. The employer could not then move the goalposts by introducing a further approval layer or a cap that had never formed part of the scheme as communicated. EAT substituted a finding of unlawful deduction.
“For those reasons, I substitute a finding that the Claimant was entitled to 1% of the JLP year one revenue less the sterling equivalent of $150,000 that was paid to him.”Bruce Carr KC, at [49]
Cites
References found in the judgments’ text, with the number of paragraphs in which each case is mentioned. Not a classification: how a case was treated is recorded under Later history.