employee out of the way and does not have the contractual right to put him on garden leave, or pay him in lieu of notice, then the only options are to encourage the use of holiday and offer a compromise agreement to waive his right to sue, in return for the intentional breach of contract. Sometimes the breach turns the termination payment into compensation rather than wages, making it tax-free, so the employee may be only too happy to go along with the ruse. Remedies In a tribunal the remedy would be compensation; in court the remedy would be damages but rarely an injunction. An injunction could be awarded to enforce a contractual disciplinary procedure, but because compensation is usually an adequate remedy for premature termination, an injunction is generally not available to keep a job going, even in a redundancy situation where the selection process has been circumvented. Action for wrongful dismissal can be brought within 6 years following the breach of an employment contract. Compensation Losses For the notice period the employer must pay wages (including any anticipated pay rise) and benefits except holiday; for wrongful dismissal, it is only possible to claim for lost earnings and damage to reputation, not for the manner of dismissal. Benefits Benefits include: pension, commission accrued and owed, bonus, overtime, accrued holiday on unpaid sick leave, income protection benefit and personal use of company car (usually running cost or hire car). Share options will often be excluded by small print. Bonuses To avoid arguments about whether these would have been earned, it may make sense to compromise by paying the usual sort of overtime or bonus the employee would have gotten if working. Courts are astute to employers trying to wriggle out of paying commission with arguments like "it was not triggered because we dismissed him before pay day". The employer is under a duty to act in good faith, not to exercise discretion spitefully or in bad faith and not to act perversely, irrationally or capriciously. Deductions The deductions that can be made from compensation are: replacement earnings or what the employee should have earned had he bothered to try (failure to mitigate), social security actually received or which could have been had he bothered to apply and compensation already awarded for unfair dismissal under the same heading. Mitigation Because it is a contract claim, the employee has a duty to