Protection for employment entitlements: A legal perspective

"Employees who have rendered faithful service, often trading off immediate pay increases for the promise of improved leave and redundancy benefits, do so trusting that the employer will honour those entitlements. As many recent corporate collapses have shown, that trust is often misplaced. This paper reviews the legal position of employee claims to entitlements. Although it offers a useful safety net, the General Employee Entitlements Redundancy Scheme (GEERS) does not provide full security. The author argues that employee associations could work to improve recovery of lost entitlements by using the legal tools employed by commercial lenders. In this way, employees could ensure that their entitlements are held ‘in trust’, in a legal sense."