From A.J. Springhall.......

The works manager had very little room in your sweeping incident in which to move but he moved in the right direction and this is because he thought through to sales and thus the bottom line.

If he had dug in his toes, as his own terms of employment very likely entitled him to do, he could in fact have lost his company valuable business, or incurred a situation in which the loss of business could have been traced back to what very likely would have been interpreted as the stubborn reaction of a blinkered production man--himself. 

There is one point here that was not detailed in your original case history. It is the problem of what may very well have developed if the indulged employee had lingered on with the company.

I am assuming now that in the litigation and eventual settlement he was required to take himself off the company’s books.

What if he had lingered on, resentfully and surlily, and probably because nothing else was offering?

It was now that the company of which you write would have unknowingly entered one of the most dangerous and least understood areas of the entire employment scene.This is when an employee on a time arrangement stays on beyond the arranged time without a new agreement or contract being put in place.

This state of affairs happens all the time and there is usually some kind of reason for it. In the instance which you describe it would have occurred because of the general wish that the individual would depart, and because of the leverage that he had over them that meant that works management was reluctant to give him the message directly.

In the case of the employee lingering on after the expiration of their formal terms of employment there are endless sources of litigation for the trouble-maker and their lawyer to brew up .

These often centre around failure to promote the person on the simple and hard-to-deny grounds that just because they were kept on they must therefore have had special value to the company.

Lawyers and especially the new breed of no win- no fee ones thrive on this one.

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