contract of employment ended prematurely...

[elche]

Firstly it will be crucial to establish your employment status are you / were you a 'worker', 'employee' or self-employed.

 

This can be difficult to work out and each case will be viewed on it's own specific facts.

 

Assuming however that you are an employee then under one month stat notice is nil and over one month until one year is one week. Your contract may well specify a longer 'contractual notice period' and you should check this. Even if your contract has no notice period specified, there is a implication that you should have been given 'reasonable notice', obvioulsy subject to your statutory minimum.

 

If you had a fixed term contract of 2 months then you need to check if the contract had a provision whereby the employer could terminate the contract earlier then the specified 2 month period. If such a provision was not a term of the contract then you may be entitled to damages which reflect the unpaid portion of the contract.

 

You may well find that the agency is using a specific type of contract that renders you an 'agency worker' with very little rights as you are no-one's employee! see for example the recent Court of Appeal decision in James v London Borough of Greenwich James v London Borough of Greenwich [2008] EWCA Civ 35 (05 February 2008)

Edited September 13, 2008 by elche

[elche]

although, it is my belief that I wsa technically an employee. My reasoning behind this would be that everything my ex-employer did indicated I was considered a permenant member of the team, and it appears they have let me go on a whim after changing their minds.

 

Thus this would be your argument. You submit a grievance claiming an unlawful deduction from wages i.e. unpaid notice pay claiming that you consider yourself to have been an employee of the agency (not an 'agency worker' or employee of the end user) with over 4 weeks continuity of service, and thus a stat entitlement to 1 weeks PILON.

 

They may consider it easier to pay than to expend time and effort defending it.

 

I do however think it is highly speculative, and that they may well ignore you, but I don't really see much else you could do.

 

Perhaps other members may have other ideas, as there is always more than one way to crack a nut, but these are my thoughts.

Edited September 13, 2008 by elche

[elche]

looks like it's not law yet.

 

I can understand the confusion as this issue has been receiving a lot of press attention recently and with gov't TUC agreements, private members bills and the proposed Agency Workers Directive the whole landscape in this area is muddled. As far as I am aware at the time of writing, the Directive is not law.

 

The following may help explain this is more detail -

 

Agency workers could gain equal rights to permanent staff at an even earlier stage than the 12-week watershed agreed last week, a senior official has warned.

The government reached an agreement with the CBI and the TUC last week which would see temporary and agency workers given equal treatment after 12 weeks in a job.

 

But the agreement has to be rubber stamped by European employment ministers next month, before being subject to further scrutiny by the European Parliament in the autumn. The European Parliament will then decide whether to give the UK government the go ahead to implement the deal into UK law as part of the Agency Workers Directive.

 

See Agency worker rights could kick in even earlier warns expert

 

NOTE to OP - You could of course try your claim on with the end user i.e. the place you actually worked also claiming that you were their employee not the agencies - your claim I suppose is that, 'I must be someone's employee?'

 

However, as I said above, currently case law is not with you on this point and this in part is the reason for the proposed new rights for agency workers who can find themselves in the perverse position of working but being no-one's employee!