The Court of Appeal has held that continuing to work (in this case for two years) following the imposition of a contractual pay-cut will not always be treated as acceptance of those terms. Previously it was thought that an employee’s decision to continue working following changes to terms and conditions would be taken as a deemed acceptance of these new terms. It seems, that this will no longer be the case.
The Council decided to impose a two-year pay freeze in March 2011. The trade unions opposed this proposal, threatening industrial action and the Council asserted that the alternative was a large number of compulsory redundancies. The Council imposed a similar freeze in April 2013 and several hundred affected employees brought claims for unlawful deductions arguing that they had a contractual entitlement to incremental pay increases.
The Court of Appeal held that all the claimants were contractually entitled to the pay increases, and that they had not implicitly agreed to a variation of contract.
Following the decision in this case it is no longer sufficient to assume that an employee who has continued to work for some duration of time after the changes have been imposed is therefore deemed to have consented to those changes.