Notice of Termination of your supplier agreement - Breach of contract - 7 days notice

Question

Bob joint a food deliver service and enter into a supplier agreement with the company.

The application process took over 2 years to be fully processed and activated so bob could start to work.

Even though many ads are still promoting the company looking for riders or drivers the application still took this very long time.

After the account was activated within a month of working for the company bob received a Notice Of Termination followed by a 7 Days Notice and the whole process of termination of the supplier contract and complete deactivation of bob's account took less than 20 days.

Bob as a professional driver always recorded the deliveries and made notes of the bad routes and other map errors, that the company APP was constantly delaying deliveries as result of this issues with the platform APP.

This included the app taking Bob to a completely different address. This error with-in the app would delay the deliver process as now bob need to find a safe location to park and manually look up the address or call the customer for more details.

These errors were all logged within the app facility "bad route" procedures that requires the correct location, picture and other notes.

This issue with the app was constant and Bob started to make notes and notified the staff working for the company though the APP as way to help them improve this issue and help the company, but the APP flagged Bob with efficiency in delivery.

Therefore, after all of this support to improve the APP making notes of the right address with a pin in the map with accurate location, including a picture of the house or building to help to quickly identify the place for next orders to take reasonable time.

Bob was often notifying the staff thinking that he was helping to solve issues for the company APP but the APP initiate an automated termination procedure and bob was fully terminated in less than 20 days without being able to get any human assistance with a response to the 7 days notice.

What are bob options here?

Answer 1

Insofar as labor law varies substantially across the globe, there is no meaningful global answer. In lieu of a specific specification of jurisdiction, I assume the arrangement is in the US. The default situation with labor contracts in the US is that employment is "at will", meaning that you can be fired on the spot, for no reason, and you can quit on the spot, for no reason. A contract might explicitly limit the allowed reasons (extremely unlikely) or impose notice requirements (relatively likely – apparently the case in this instance). Naturally, one would have to scrutinize the rest of the contract to see if there are any limitations on the employer's right to fire the employee.

Suppose that the contract dictates that the agreement cannot terminate unilaterally except after having been served with 5 notices of inefficiency. The company maintains that it served 5 such notices and then terminated the contract; Bob maintains that he only received 1 notice. Then Bob could take the company to court for breach of contract unless he is contractually required to resolve the matter with binding arbitration (very common). The legal dispute would reduce to a contract-language / law dispute and an issue of fact. The legal question is what kind of "notice" is required. The general guideline is here in the UCC – is the requirement that the employee receive notice, or than the employer give notice. The fact question is whether the employer provably did give notice, or the employee did not receive notice. We might suppose that the company emails the notice but it went into the employees spam box, which is not the companies fault.

There is no legal requirement that you be able to get "human assistance", or that efforts to improve a company's product override efficiency requirements. The 2 year pre-employment processing time is also legally irrelevant. So those arguments could not be made.

Answer 2

What are bob options here?

Although the title and the tag mention breach of contract, it is unclear from your description whether a breach occurred at all.

Knowing the terms of Bob's contract with the company is crucial for identifying a possible breach. The unusual premise that "[t]he application process took over 2 years [...] so [B]ob could start to work" suggests that this is a hypothetical scenario with too many gaps.

Bob will need to ascertain from the contract the company's obligations toward Bob in regard to the platform/APP or to Bob's performance and in general; any condition(s) for termination of the contract; and any clauses regarding the methods for resolution of disputes. This information will help identify what additional details about the parties' performance of the contract are relevant.