Employment Agreement

You can download the employment agreement Serco and I signed in Feb 2011.  

The two important paragraphs in this document are the first which states my position and salary and the sixth which reads:

"Your hiring is subject to your review and understanding of and agreement to adhere to, the policies and practices of Serco, and the employment relationship is based on the mutual consent of the employee and Serco.  Accordingly this relationship is at will, and either you or the company can terminate this relationship with or without cause or advance notice, at any time,  Neither this letter nor any other oral or written representations may be considered a contract for any specific period of time."

When reading this
paragraph the important thing to keep in mind is the last sentence does not state that Serco and I don't have a contract.  The last sentence says that the contract we have doesn't have a specific time associated with it.  In other words we didn't have an established end date to our contract, instead our contract would continue until either Serco or I terminated the employment relationship.

In fact, it is impossible for there to be a legal employer / employee relationship without it being contractual.  Keep in mind that there are different kinds of contracts.  
For instance there are explicit contracts where all the terms are written out and defined and there are implicit contracts which can be viewed as contracts where the terms aren't necessarily written out but there is solid understanding of the terms because of what has been said.  Think of a hand shake contract.  There are also contracts that are less defined; look up promissory estoppel on the internet.  

Even though we might call them by different names all these contracts have the same characteristics.  The Supreme Court of Ohio listed these characteristics in a court case called Lakeland v
Columber.  In paragraph 14 of that decision they define the Formation of Binding Contract,  "The elements of a contract include the following: an offer, an acceptance, contractual capacity, consideration (the bargained-for legal benefit or detriment), a manifestation of mutual assent, and legality of object and of consideration."  I'm not going to list how each of these was satisfied between Serco and me but as soon as I started my first minute of work the terms of our contract including the mutually agreed to salary, became effective and binding.  Now the 6th paragraph of our agreement tells us that this contract could have lasted one minute or it could have lasted forever because either one of us could terminate employment and get out of the rest of the contract by doing so at any time.  However, the fact is the neither of us did this until Jan 20, 2013 therefore that contract was in effect until that date.  

If you read all the court documents from my case against Serco you will see that Serco tries to argue that because they are an employer they should be able to change the terms of our contract at any time without limitations.  But that was not in our contract and that is not something that I agreed to when I signed that contract.  I agreed that they could fire me at any time and that I could quit at any time.  I signed an agreement, and so did they, that the terms of our contract were set by mutual agreement.  It is incredible that anyone would think that just because I signed an agreement to provide my services for $100,000 a year that this meant that I automatically consented to
letting Serco dictate the value of my services was just $57,000.  I lived up to my end of the contract and provided $100,000 worth of services.  Its time for Serco to live up to its end and pay what they agreed to pay.