Pay Query

Becles

I work ad-hoc for several field merchandising agencies on zero hours contracts and just pick up work as and when it's available. All the companies I've worked for pay a flat fee per call.

I joined a new company and my pay is a lot lower than I expected. My fault as I misread the paperwork and thought it was £7.50 per call, but I'm actually being paid £7.50 per hour for time spent in store. I'm not being paid anything for the travelling time between calls or time spent printing off paperwork and doing data entry at home.

As an example, I did a route of calls last Monday and was out for 5.5 hours only doing their calls and spent around 1.5 hours doing printing and data entry. For 7 hours work, I've earned £24.40, so well below minimum wage (£3.48 an hour!)

Can they get away with this? They are a PAYE company so I'm an employee, not self employed.

guardianangel

As you are paid £7.50 per hour that is above national minimum wage so that is legal.
What I probably would have done was query the hourly rate when I got my contract and clarified it. Unfortunately as you have worked it, you have accepted their terms and conditions, even if you may not have returned a signed contract.

It's hard to go into details as I don't have your contract or the wording. What I would suggest is that you check what your expenses policy is as well in regards to traveling.

One thing I would ask is where is your base location?
Do you know whether everyone in the team does the same or did you misunderstand, I find it strange that they don't pay you for the rest of the work...

Becles

I'm based at home.

It's only the time that I'm actually signed into the store that I'm being paid for. There's nothing in the contract to say about travelling time.

So for example in the 5.5 hour route of calls I mentioned, I was signed into different stores for 3.25 hours, and the remaining 2.25 hours covers the time spent driving to the different shops and back home again.

The 1.5 hours covers printing off paperwork and planning my route, and then spending time entering my results afterwards and uploading photographs.

I've never met the rest of the team or anyone from the company. That's normal for this type of work though.