Termination of Employment Contract in Research Proposal

Request must be made in writing by the employee within 15 working days of termination. The employer has 10 working days from receipt of the request to give a truthful reason in writing for the termination." (P 1).

Despite that many employers have been very careful in terminating the contract employment agreement based on justifiable cause; there are still series of cases where employees challenge the termination of their employment contracts. Mandelsohn, (1990) argues that employees may establish in the court of law that they have the right to continue working based on the employment contract. Typically, employees could establish that there is no provision in the employment contract that employers have the right to terminate their employment contracts. If a plaintiff is able to establish that he has the right to continued employment, an employer must convincingly present its case that he has a good cause to terminate the employment contract. On the other hand, if employee is able to establish that he is wrongfully terminated, an employer will be asked to pay for the damages. A case between Cleary v. American Airline (1980) shows that violation of covenant could resort into tort damage. The case shows that the employer violates covenants when the employer terminates the employee without a good cause.

One of celebrative cases that involve employment contract termination was the case of Foley v Interactive Data Corp. Foley (Plaintiff). Foley was employed for more than 7 years and received number of promotions. When the company hired a new supervisor, Foley heard that the new supervisor was involved in the series embezzlement and reported the issue to upper management. Less than two-month later, the company dismissed Foley. California Supreme Court held position that Foley contract employment termination was a wrongful termination and the court asked the company to pay for the damages.

On the other hand, Schirru, & Brown, (2009) argue that employer may be justified in the court with the termination of employment contract. The authors argue that employment contract are made up of implied and express terms, and the implied terms in the contract agreement mostly lead to dispute between employees and employers with relation to employment contract termination. In the employment contract, express terms are the terms that have been specifically mentioned and agreed by both parties in the employment contract. Express terms could be either oral or written. Express term of employment includes things such as rank, hours of work and remuneration. On the other hand, implied terms are the terms not being mentioned by both parties; however they are included in the contract. For example, Sale of Goods Act 1979 mandates salesman under Section 15 that "if you're selling the goods by sample -- you show the customer one bag of flour and they order 50 bags -- then the bulk order has to be of the same quality as the sample." (Riley, 2012 P. 1). Implied terms is often prominent in the dismissal claims and employee my not be able to challenge its dismissal in the court of law.

A case between Colwell v. Cornerstone Properties supports this issue. The Court found Colwell breached an implied duty that each party needs to treat in a good faith in the employment contract. Thus, employer was justified to dismiss the employee because of the breach of implied contract. On the other hand, an employee may establish a successful dismissal claim under implied terms. For example, in a case between Reynolds v. Innopac Inc., the Company required the executive to relocate to British Columbia and refusal of the executive to move to British Colombia led to employee's dismissal. Following the case in the Ontario Court of Appeal in Canada, the court held that the company could not mandate requiring executive to move to British Columbia because this was not written in the employment contract. Thus, the court required the company to pay for the damages.

Collins (2011) in his own case points out that cases involving employment contract termination is generally being treated by the employment tribunals in the UK. The UK law designates difference between workers and employees. While workers generally have less extensive protections under the law, employees in the UK generally enjoy wider protection. Cases of wrongful employment contract termination are not being treated lightly under the UK law. However, the highest amount that a court awards an employee for a wrong dismissal is £234,549.Following the review of the past studies that discuss the cases relating to the termination of employment contracts, the research presents the research methodology that discusses the method of data collection.

Research Methodology

This section discusses the method that the study will use to collect data and find answers to the research questions. The section also presents method of data analysis and presentation of findings.

Research Design

Research design is a plan and outline use to achieve the research objective, solve research problems and generate answers to the research questions. (Orodho, 2003). The proposal will prepare the research design after formulating the research problem.

"This involves stating the conceptual structure within which research was to be conducted. The preparation of such a design facilitates research to be as efficient as possible yielding maximum information" (Wandera, 2011 P. 193). The research design will assist the researcher to collect relevant information with minimal amount of money, time and effort. The study will adopt survey design in collecting primary data. Moreover, the study will collect data relevant to cases involving terminating of employment contract across the United States. The data will establish the extent the cases involving employment contract termination has increased in the United States. The descriptive research design is considered to be appropriate for the study. The major benefit of descriptive statistics is that it is more appropriate to answer the research questions which will consequently serve as indirect method to test model. A major shortcoming of descriptive statistics is that the researcher may not have control on all the variables. (Somekh, and Cathy, 2005).

Method of Data Collection

The research will use questionnaire to collect data from sample population and email will be used to distribute the questionnaire to the sample population. Typically, approximately 500 questionnaires will be distributed to the sample population with the aim to collect 100 valid and reliable data. More importantly, the research will collect data on the number of cases relating to the termination of employment contract of 10 states in the United States. The researcher will collect 10-year data on the cases on employment contract termination. The goal of the data collection is to establish that there has been an increase in the number of employment contract termination cases in the United States. The researcher will collect the case data from High Court, Supreme Court data, and other courts across the United States.

To supplement the primary data, the study will also collect data from several Law Reviews especially from employment law reviews. The study will also collect data from several academic database, and university libraries.

Sample Population

The research will collect data from several executive of private and public organizations, and legal practitioners. The questionnaire will be used to collect data from sample population and the researcher will distribute up to 500 questionnaires in order to collect valid data from the sample population.

Ethical Issues

This proposal will strictly follow the ethical consideration when collecting data. The researcher will follow the university ethical policy when collecting the personal information of sample population. As a matter of ethical principles, the researcher will protect the personal information of the sample population by ensuring that all the information collected will not be released to third party. Moreover, the researcher will endeavor to respect the views of the sample population and the valued convictions and beliefs of respondents will be respected in the study. All the primary data collected will not be personalized and will be handled in a confidentiality manner.

Proposed Findings, Analysis and Presentation

The main objective of the study is to explore the cases involving the termination of employment contract in labor law. The data collected will be analyzed using Microsoft Excel 2007 or SPSS. The descriptive statistics will be used to analyze data. The charts, tables, and graphs will be used to present findings.

Research Time-Table

The study will take approximately 3 years to complete starting from September, 2013 and complete on August 2016. The research time table is presented in the table below.

Table 1: Research Time Table

Chapters

Dates

Chapters 1: Introduction

September 2013- May 2014

Chapters 2: Literature Review

June 2014- December,2014

Chapters 3: Research Methodology

January 2015- June 2015

Chapters 4: Data Analysis

July 2015- December 2015

Chapters 5: Findings

January 2016-April 2016

Chapters 6: Conclusion and Recommendations

May 2016-August.....