Employment contract

jonnygee2

A contract was mutually signed and agreed upon. My monthly wage is massively under what my contract says I should be earning. Is a work contract legally binding regardless of any errors in wage made on it?

Short answer: no. Like many things in employment it comes down to what is reasonable and fair. The written employment agreement only forms part of this picture.

Say, for example, the job was advertised at £30,000 a year. You applied for it and accepted, but on the employment contract the employer accidentally wrote £30,000 a month. You cannot in this situation reasonably claim that you thought you were being paid £30,000 a month. It wouldn't be fair to make an employer shell out £30,000 because of a typo.

On the other hand, say you had good reason to believe you were going to be paid around £30,000 a year, because that's roughly what the role would be worth. The salary was never advertised or communicated to you apart from when they sent the contract which said £30,000 a year. In that case for the work you have done so far you could reasonably expect to be paid the equivalent of £30,000 a year. So you could probably claim any backdated wages.

But also, if they accidentally got themselves into a situation where they were paying £30,000 a year for a job they actually think was £20,000 a year, by far the best solution for them would be to terminate your contract using the probation clause. You'd obviously be owed wages from when you started to when your employment ended, but you'd also potentially be out of a job.