Where No Equivalent Private Law Remedies in Contract or Common Law
From the exposition of the cases above, it is clear that courts outside of the region have chosen not to proceed along the Walsh route only where alternative or adequate, private law remedies are available.
This, however, has not always been the experience in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Indeed, in some Commonwealth Caribbean countries, the common law presumption of employment at will still obtains and no safeguard has been established for termination of employment. This is the case, for example, in St Lucia and Barbados. It is therefore incongruous to transplant this progressive jurisprudence to jurisdictions such as ours where such alternative private law remedies are absent.St Lucia, Jamaica and Barbados, for example, have no requisite statutory provisions against unfair dismissals. Unfair dismissal legislation is an important development in employment law which imports standards of both substantive and procedural fairness in the employment relationship. The employer is required to give a valid reason before it can legitimately dismiss an employee. Further, an employer must afford a hearing to an employee before such employee is dismissed.[339]
Similarly, common law developments on procedural fairness in dismissals based on the mutual duty of trust and confidence implied into the contract are not evident in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Elsewhere, such duties have grown up alongside statutory remedies for unlawful dismissal, either in individual employment law or employment law relating to industrial relations and the union. In Trinidad and Tobago, the jurisprudence of the specialized Industrial Relations Court — in particular, its reliance on �good industrial relations practice’ — has resulted in notions of fairness being imported into the common law. Similarly, in Jamaica, judicial developments have focused on contemporary labour law �ameliorating’ the harsh position of the common law with regard to employment relationships.[340] In the absence of such judicial or statutory developments, however, an employer under common law principles of contract can still dismiss employees without a reason and without procedural fairness without violating mutual trust and confidence.
14.