Cross-border employment disputes are hardly a recent innovation. Ever since the House of Lords wrestled with a worldwide non-compete for a Swedish arms manufacturer in Nordenfelt in 1894, the UK courts have been entirely comfortable policing international restraints. But as the agenda for this May’s International Employment Lawyers Association gathering in Paris makes clear, what was once the preserve of global industrialists and high-value Chancery litigation has now trickled down to everyday tribunal practice. The jurisdictional tripwire is no longer an anomaly; it is a routine hazard.
Consider what actually happened in Morais v Ryanair DAC KB → [2025] EWCA Civ 19. A group of UK-based Ryanair pilots, BALPA members, took lawful strike action in 2019. Ryanair's response was to strip them of their concessionary staff travel perks for a year—a punishment dressed up as a commercial decision. The pilots then reached for an unlikely weapon: the Employment Relations Act 1999 (Blacklisting) Regulations 2010. Drafted with Consulting Association-style construction industry blacklists in mind, the Regulations were never intended for European aviation. Yet the pilots successfully argued that compiling a list of strikers to deny benefits was precisely the mischief the statute prohibited.
Ryanair, an Irish Designated Activity Company, protested that the regulations could not possibly reach it. The Court of Appeal disagreed. Corporate structures built to complicate jurisdiction, it turns out, are not nearly as clever as their architects hoped. When messy human facts—like retaliating against a strike by removing flight perks—are forced across borders, domestic statutes can be stretched to catch them.
This cross-border fault line runs deepest in whistleblowing. The EU Whistleblowing Directive imposes rigorous internal reporting channels and protects reporters across the supply chain—a systemic regime concerned with process. The UK, by contrast, remains wedded to personal blame, a position reaffirmed with palpable reluctance in Rice v Wicked Vision Ltd KB → [2025] EWCA Civ 1466.
Mr Rice was a sales director who, during the pandemic, formed the view that his employer was claiming furlough money for staff who were quietly still working. He blew the whistle, and was promptly dismissed. Rather than simply suing the company, his advisors reached for the Timis v Osipov manoeuvre: they sued the managing director personally for the detriment of procuring the dismissal. The Court of Appeal, through gritted teeth, confirmed this route remains open. A French parent rolling out a unified European whistleblowing policy discovers its UK arm operates on an entirely different logic. Brussels polices the channel; Westminster polices the culprit, exposing individual managers to personal ruin. Harmonising a system built on process with one built on personal liability is a compliance migraine.
Then there is the employee who simply leaves—except nothing about leaving a family business is ever simple. Morgan v SMS Farming Ltd KB → (ET, 2025) arose from the unwinding of a tangled agricultural enterprise in which the claimant had been variously described as director, shareholder, employee, and family member. When the relationship collapsed, the litigation splintered across two forums: an unfair dismissal claim in the Employment Tribunal and a parallel shareholder dispute in the Chancery Division.
The Tribunal's task was the familiar one: was there a contract of employment beneath the family arrangement? It is a factual inquiry of a particularly unforgiving kind, utterly indifferent to the labels the parties used when everyone was still speaking. Once those facts acquire a cross-border dimension, the comforting fiction that a governing-law clause operates as a talisman evaporates. The reality of where the work was done, and who controlled it, simply overrides the contract.
I am regularly instructed to rescue the litigation aftermath of these supposedly watertight clauses. I can report that Spanish labour law is remarkably uninterested in what the ET1 says when the claimant has been sitting in Valencia for six months, just as Chancery judges are rarely impressed by neat contractual labels that clash with property realities. The governing-law clause is not useless, but it is not armour either.
Practical Takeaways
- Transnational Reach: A foreign corporate vehicle does not reliably defeat UK statutory detriment claims. Morais shows that domestic instruments like the Blacklisting Regulations can be successfully deployed against cross-border structures.
- Whistleblowing Asymmetry: EU-compliant reporting structures require a UK-specific overlay to account for the personal and vicarious liability exposure reaffirmed in Rice.
- Remote-Work Drift: Temporal limits on overseas working need to be specified and enforced. Mandatory local protections accrue by factual conduct, not by contract.
The wider point from IELA is not that borders have disappeared. It is that they now behave less like walls and more like tripwires. By the time everyone agrees the arrangement was "international", the expensive part has usually already happened.