employment england-and-wales legal-terms common-law wrongful-dismissal
Can a worker who is not an employee be wrongfully dismissed? (England &amp; Wales)
<p>Does wrongful dismissal (NB. I don't mean unfair) apply to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/employment-status/worker" rel="nofollow noreferrer">workers</a> who are not employees in England &amp; Wales?</p>
<p>My understanding from my lecturer is that it does apply (it came up on a test question which I got wrong for not saying workers could be wrongfully dismissed). However, I find this confusing because our reading material and the lecture slides only reference an employee being wrongfully dismissed.</p>
<p>Example: In Introduction to Business Law (Lucy Jones, 5th Ed) it states: &quot;If an employer dismisses the employee without giving him the notice agreed in his contract, or dismisses him in breach of his contract in any other way, then this would be a wrongful dismissal.”</p>
<p>This paragraph is stated after making clear the difference between 'worker' and 'employee'. Namely that employees are a subset of workers and where employees have a contract of service, workers have a contract for service.</p>
<p>I've also seen other sources which say wrongful dismissal happens when a term of an employment contract is broken. That also adds to the confusion since workers who are not employees don't have an employment contract.</p>
<p>So if workers can be wrongfully dismissed, why do so many materials talk about employees rather than workers?</p>
<p>(Computer Science is my main subject, not law, so I think I'm potentially missing some foundational knowledge that would make all this obvious.)</p>

<p>If you end someone's services (or service) without giving the notice required in the contract and without having any legally valid reason to do that then that will be a repudiatory breach of contract.</p>
<p>Whether it is correct to describe that as <em>wrongful dismissal</em> is really a matter of terminology.</p>
<p><em>Dismissal</em> is a word often associated with ending of employment specifically so that if the person is merely a worker you might be less likely to use the word <em>dismissal</em>. But, that said, the word is used sometimes outside employment. A client may be said to dismiss their barrister and a barrister is not an employee (nor a worker for that matter)</p>
<p><em>Wrongful</em> is a word used in a variety of contexts usually where the person wronged is in in some kind of subordinate position to the person doing the <em>wrong</em> - e.g. wrongful arrest.</p>
<p>So there isn't really any theoretical reason why you can't describe a worker  as having been wrongfully dismissed even if they are not an employee but the phrase <em>wrongful dismissal</em> does tend to be used as a phrase specifically referring to the employment context.</p>
