Rectification, Employment Contracts, and Collective Agreements – Industrial Law Journal
‘One of the oddities of British labour law, especially when compared with its continental and common law cousins, is that collective agreements concluded as a result of the collective bargaining process between an employer and a trade union have no necessary legal effect whether vis-à-vis the employer and the union or vis-à-vis the employer and an individual employee. On the former relationship—which is sometimes referred to the ‘contractual dimension’ of collective agreements—the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, s 179, conclusively presumes that such agreements were not intended by the parties to take effect as legally enforceable contracts unless the agreement is in writing and contains a provision which states that the parties intend that the agreement shall be a legally enforceable contract. As for the latter—which can be referred to as the ‘normative dimension’ of collective agreements, whereby the ‘norms’ in the collective agreement ‘are applied to the individual employment relationship’—ordinarily, for a collective agreement to have any legal effect, it must be incorporated into an individual’s contract of employment and there is no automatic rule to this effect.’
Industrial Law Journal, 9th July 2025
Source: academic.oup.com
