UK companies are not going to be able to out engineer UK labor protections to arrive at the US' at will experience. Such is the point of labor laws and protections. They can update the procedures, they'll still end up in court or tribunals. This is not the US (thankfully).
I'm saying they're going to update the contracts to match the labor laws.
If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated, contracts will now have a lot of fireable offenses explicitly enumerated. That's not evading the law, that's literally how you comply with the law.
> I'm saying they're going to update the contracts to match the labor laws.
No they're not. This ruling makes no difference to the legal, employment or contractual landscape of the UK. Reading the ruling, it was resolved in exactly the way any competent HR lawyer would expect. The employer was bang out of order and was rightly slapped down by the court.
> If the labor laws say you have to have fireable offenses explicitly enumerated
No they don't. As others have pointed out: the ruling flags that the contract itself enumerates gross misconduct offences. Some of which include "excessive swearing" or "swearing at customers." Given the context of what the contract does enumerate, the court found that the contract does not consider this, obviously, lesser misconduct was out of scope of gross misconduct, as per the terms of the contract.
If the contract did not include such a specific list, but merely described a more broad category of things that are considered gross misconduct, then the court might have ruled differently.
