The limits to arbitrary dismissal in british Labour Law

Abstract

Under british Labour Law, employees only have a specific protection against unfair dismissals if they have at least one year of continuous employment with the same employer (two years are required if the cause of dismissal is Redundancy). Once the employee has reached the period of continuous employment required, he or she may claim against unfair dismissal. The paper studies the statutory protection, that in some aspects is quite similar to that of our own labour law, however, in other aspects the regulation bears no relation, allowing dismissals that under our legal system would be considered void. However, the situation is even worse if the employee does not have the minimum period of continuous employment in order to apply statutory protection, as in that case there is only the protection offered by Common Law, which hardly offers guarantees to the employees and is also analised in this paper.