"So Far as Money Can do it …" Some Aspects of Damages for Wrongful Dismissal in Barbados
Jeff Cumberbatch
DOI: 10.2190/D0QT-ACR6-2N60-LE0W
Abstract
Barbados, unlike most of the other states of the Commonwealth Caribbean has not enacted legislation for the purpose of regulating an employer's power to dismiss his employees at will or with reasonable notice, in either case without any need to show good cause for doing so. However, in the absence of such legislation, generally accepted to be a result of International Labour Organisation Recommendation 119 (1963), the Barbadian Court of Appeal has held in the case of Barbados Plastics Ltd. v. Juliette Taylor (1979) that the employee who has worked for more than two years is entitled not to be dismissed without good cause, based on the provisions of the Severance Payments Act. The remedy for such a dismissal is damages assessed at an amount not less than what a severance payment would have been. In this article, the author examines the nature of this remedy and analyzes it in the light of two recent cases dealing with, inter alia, gratuity, the availability of the award in conjunction with the common law remedy for wrongful dismissal and lastly, its subjectability to tax. The author concludes that legislation should be enacted to reinforce the employee's protection and to provide for the remedy of reinstatement.
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