Upping contracted hours - advice?

petenw90

Hi everyone,

Long time lurker on here, thought I'd get involved!
I was wondering if anyone out there in MSE land could give me a bit of advice.

I've recently started a job (now in week 13). There were two 16-hour positions available and I was the only person recruited. As a result, I've been working 32 hours every week for the past 13 weeks. I'm perfectly happy to do this, and would actually prefer to be working permanently for those hours. The only trouble is, my contract is 16 hours and as a result, I won't get paid as much for my holidays and I'm lacking the financial security.

My question is, is there a certain period where this automatically becomes my normal working hours? (e.g. I can request a new contract and be legally backed up?)

Thanks for reading

SarEl

No - or at least not for a very long time and probably not ever. I suspect that if you read your contract closely it says something like "at least" 16 hours or a "minimum" of 16 hours. Such conditions are very common in some industries - particularly retail - where people are taken on for 8 or 16 hours and anything over that is not contractual.

agrinnall

I'm sure SarEl is right, even if it's unfair that you don't accrue holiday for the hours that you work, but that doesn't mean you can't ask your employer whether they would consider changing your contract to 32 hours per week, if they had taken 2 people on they would have to have paid both of you for holidays so it's not as if they are losing out on what they originally intended.