noblepa wrote:IANAL, and I don't live in the UK, but here in the former British colonies, ordinary employment is NOT considered a contract. In most states, such employment is referred to as "at will employment". This means that the employee serves at will and may leave at any time.
[ . . .]
But, yes, at least here in the US, an employer IS legally required to pay an employee for time worked.
In the United States, the term “contract” has more than one legal meaning, and more than one common, every day meaning.
A contract is, generally, a promise or a set of promises for which the breach of which the law gives a remedy, or the performance of which the law recognizes as a duty. A contract can be oral or written, or some combination thereof.
From a technical legal standpoint, the employment relationship almost invariably involves a
contract.
For example, if – as is generally the case – the employer and the employee have an agreement that the employee will be paid for this work and the employer will have the right to control what is to be done and how it is to be done, you have a contract – a legally binding agreement, even if the agreement is oral and even if the employment is “at will.”
Traditionally, the law considered employment to be a matter of private contract between the employer and employee. The law of master and servant developed originally as an offshoot of the law of domestic relations, and master and servant alike were bound by obligations to each other. [ . . .] With the advent of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, and the laissez-faire attitude which pervaded that era, the freedom of contract approach expanded. In the United States, the rule was quickly established that the employment relationship was one which pertained between equals: the employee was free to quit to seek alternate employment whenever he wanted, and the employer was free to fire the employee at any time.
--from Mark A. Rothstein, Andria S. Knapp & Lance Liebman,
Cases and Materials on Employment Law, p. 2, Foundation Press (1987).
I had Mark Rothstein as my professor for one of my employment law courses in law school.
Sure, we sometimes say that such an employee had no “contract.” That, however, is a figure of speech. What we often mean here is either that the employment contract was “at will”, or that the contract was strictly oral (that there was no written contract).
EDIT: corrected my typo
"My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line." -- David Mamet
