Employment status: Insufficient control meant that worker was not employee of agency

A person who found work through an employment agency and remained in that same job for more than two years was not employed by the agency, holds the Court of Appeal in Montgomery v Johnson Underwood Ltd 9.3.01. In deciding that she was the agency's employee, an employment tribunal had failed to apply the legal principle that there must be an irreducible minimum of mutual obligation, including a sufficient degree of control over the worker, for a contract of employment to exist. In this case, the tribunal treated those fundamental factors as no more than "material for the melting pot" and, after looking at the relationship between the parties as a whole, wrongly concluded that the worker was an employee, notwithstanding that the criteria of sufficient control was absent.