Fowler Vs Faccenda Case Summary

1728 Words7 Pages

201201180
October 8
2015

KHUMO SEROJANE
DEPARTMENT OF LAW LAW 334 EMPLOYMENT LAW TEST ONE

A contract of employment is an agreement, either oral or written, setting out the terms as bilaterally negotiated by the parties and conditions provided for in the contract. A contract of employment is not a special type of contract, it is one like any other, therefore normal rules and essentials of agreement apply. In an employment contract, a person, ‘employee’, undertakes to perform certain duties as he is directed and controlled by another person, ‘employer’. In return for performance of such duties, the employee shall receive a salary or wage as agreed upon between the …show more content…

This then begs the question as to what type of information is confident. The court in the English case of Faccenda Chicken v Fowler stated that the information gained by an employee falls into three categories: Information so accessible to the public, confidential information and special trade secrets. In the Faccenda case, the respondent was employed as a sales manager of the plaintiff company. His employment later ended and he then set up his own business of selling chicken. He competed with the appellant and the majority of his customers were former customers of the appellant. The appellant argued that the respondent had broken his contract, in particular the implied duty of good faith and fidelity by using customer lists and pricing information it obtained while employed by the applicant. The court held that the duty of good faith will be broken if an employee makes or copies a list of the customers of his employer for use after his employment ends, except in special circumstances, there is no general restriction on an ex-employee canvassing or doing business with customers of his former employer. Further that the pricing information in question was not a trade secret and ousted to the fact that the sales information was necessarily acquired by the employee in order that they could do their …show more content…

Had the defendant started his business while still employed and obtained customer information, then he would be liable as it was held in the case of Wessex Dairies v Smith (1935) 2 KB 80 where an employee was held liable for soliciting his masters customers to transfer their custom to himself, even though the transfer was to take effect only after he terminated his services , but in this case Rembrandt Chenayi Jangano is not in breach of the duty as the soliciting of customers only occurred after the termination of his services. The plaintiff company was unable to establish that the defendant breached his duty of fidelity during his employment by diverting business for his own

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