What importance do express terms have in establishing an employment relationship?

Authored by Heidi Roberts, Partner and Amanda Loftus, Lawyer, Corrs Chambers Westgarth. Updated by the LexisNexis Legal Writer team.

All employment relationships are underpinned by a contract of employment. As with other contracts, the employment contract will be formed by the making of an offer by one party and the acceptance, for valuable consideration, of the offer by the other party. In employment relationships, the consideration is the promise by the employer to pay the employee for the employee’s work and the promise by the employee to perform that work.

A contract of employment may be written, oral or a combination of the two. Irrespective of the form of the contract, it will comprise both express terms and implied terms.

What are express terms?

Express terms are the terms of the contract that have been explicitly agreed between the employer and the employee. Express terms may be oral or written, or both.

The express terms agreed between the parties may deal with the entirety of the rights and obligations arising in the employment relationship (ie where the parties have entered into a comprehensive written contract of employment) or they may be more limited and only deal with a specific number of matters (such as salary, hours of work and duties of the employee).