Employment

It was settled law that when an employee resigned, the test for determining whether their resignation should be treated as their dismissal was not whether their employers had behaved unreasonably towards them, but whether their employers had broken their contract of employment in some fundamental way. In many cases, the term of the contract of employment which the employers were alleged to have broken was the implied term of trust and confidence, namely the term that the employers would not act towards the employee in such a way as was likely, or was intended, to destroy or damage seriously the trust and confidence between them which was at the heart of the working relationship between employer and employee. The question whether the employers had behaved reasonably came into its own when the fairness of the employee’s constructive dismissal was being addressed. It was a little artificial to have to ask what the reason for an employee’s dismissal had been in a case