Self Employed but no holiday pay!

starserv

Hi just been offered a job for a firm guaranteed 40 hours with sick pay but i have to register as self employed and no payed holidays is this legal and correct?

neil277

starserv wrote: »

Hi just been offered a job for a firm guaranteed 40 hours with sick pay but i have to register as self employed and no payed holidays is this legal and correct?

Hi Starserv
This is a good question if they use an umbrella company you will be like a PAYE, if you dig deep you will see lots of problems/ Legal or not do you want the job

KiKi

starserv wrote: »

Hi just been offered a job for a firm guaranteed 40 hours with sick pay but i have to register as self employed and no payed holidays is this legal and correct?

Hi there

'Self-employed' status isn't determined by you or the company. It's determined by HMRC. There are rules around what is self-employment and what isn't.

If you are self-employed, it means that you can choose your hours, turn down work, use your own equipment (such as a laptop etc), send someone else in if you can't be bothered to go in, and usually you do work for a set fee and correct mistakes in your own time.

If they are dictating your work, if you're going in for 40 hours a week with no other clients, if you are the only one who can go in to do the job, and if you work from their premises, regularly, and get a regular salary paid by the hour / week / month then you are an employee.

Self-employment doesn't come with paid holidays or sick pay - that's the point of it! You work for yourself. If you want a day off, you take it. But you get no pay. The same if you are off sick.

Companies that ask you to register as self-employed when actually you should be an employee are usually doing two things:
a) avoiding paying tax and NI (because you have to pay it yourself)
b) ensuring that you have no employment rights - no paid holiday, no sick leave, no notice period, no redundancy protection, no recourse to the law

The fact that they are giving you 40 hours a week and sick pay rings alarm bells. They are absolutely right that you should have no paid holiday if you are self-employed, but it sounds to me like they're getting out of their responsibilities here. On the face of it, it seems that this should be an employed position.

This page tells you what is employed and what isn't: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/employment-status/index.htm


You can still take the job, but ask yourself whether or not you want to work for a company that is either incredibly ignorant of the law, or deliberately shirking it's responsibilities. You will have no employment protection if you are self-employed.

HTH
KiKi