Contract employee cannot claim extension of service deal as a right: LHC

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court dismissing a petition of contract employees of Population Welfare Department held that a contract employee cannot claim extension of the service contract as a right.

The court said it is the prerogative of the concerned authorities to decide the matter of continuing the employee in service or dispensing with the same in accordance with needs of the employer.

Petitioners Mohsin Arif and other contract employees of the Population Welfare Department were working in the project of adolescent reproductive health education cells in family health clinics.

The petitioners claimed that the respondent department wrongly terminated their contract in violation of terms of their employment contracts.

The court held that the order in question seems to be an intimation only conveying that the tenure of the contract of the project employees had expired and was not being extended any further.

The court said conveying to any employee that his tenure of contractual employment has expired, unless the same is factually incorrect, neither is an adverse order nor does it provide any cause of action to the said employee to challenge the same.

The court said in fact, the petitioners are seeking extension of tenure of their contracts by claiming, the same to be premature termination of contracts.

The court said through this order, the respondents neither prematurely terminated the contract of the petitioners nor imposed any stigma on them for not extending their contracts any further. Hence, they were not entitled to one-month notice for termination of contract, the court added.

The court said even otherwise, the petitioners were not governed by any statutory rules of service and at the most principle of master and servant would be applicable to their case, which does not entitle the petitioners to file the constitutional petition.

The court dismissed the petition and observed that the instant petition is not maintainable as no ground to interfere in the impugned order is made out.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023