Employment contract - variable hours

emv

Hi

I'm looking to take on a few part-time employees whose hours will be highly variable, depending on their availability (i.e. they will choose how many hours they are available) and demand. In practice, they will work no hours at all some weeks & up to 12 hours on other weeks. I believe that it's OK to offer a contract of employment that states that there are no regular working hours. This means that I'll have to calculate holiday pay as an average of previous hours but is there anything else I need to be aware of?

Thanks

Victoria

Savvy_Sue

The only other thing I can think of is knowing when they've left you! I used to do PAYE for an out of school club: we had a lot of students, some of whom did term time only while they were at Uni and others who did vacation only while they were at home. Although I would send them rotas so they could tell them when they wanted to work, they didn't always get in touch if they didn't want to work - they might skip a term or a vacation, and then come back.

This did lead to a couple of snotty letters from HMRC saying "Why haven't you given this person a P45?" Well, maybe because I didn't know they'd got another job and didn't intend coming back to me!

I think the other way you can calculate holiday pay is to put something into their holiday pot every time they work, I THINK I used to use 1/13. If they were a term-time person, I'd pay them this the week after term ended. I found this fairer than averaging it over the previous weeks' earnings: an employee can play that to their advantage by only booking holiday after they've worked a lot of hours for several weeks!

However, whatever you do, you need to be transparent, ie tell them what you are doing.

Whatever my holiday pay calculation was, it was based on the fact that a full-time person would work 39 hours pw, and over 52 weeks, they'd be entitled to 20 days paid holiday - note it's now 24 days, and going up to 28 days, but this can include bank holidays.

Although ACAS probably won't advise you as an employer, it's worth looking around their site, and there is also a govt site which might be helpful to you. I can never remember what that one's called, however ...

emv

Thanks, Sue - I anticpate keeping in touch with them (luckily most of them will be friends anyway, at least before they start working for me!!) so I hope that won't be a problem & part of their contract will ask them to get in touch to let me know of their availability for the following week.

Thanks for the useful holiday pay info, as well.

Best wishes

Victoria

emv

Just did a quick Google search & found out that it's now illegal to add holiday pay onto normal pay - I know this used to be common pratcice, so I'm not trying to suggest Sue did anything illegal!

"Some employers and employment agencies may say that your hourly rate of pay includes an amount for holiday pay, and that they expect you to save this part of your pay to cover your holidays. This is known as 'rolled up' holiday pay. Rolled up holiday pay is against the law.


If you think you are getting rolled up holiday pay, you should contact an experienced adviser, for example, at a Citizens Advice Bureau."

Savvy_Sue

No, I wasn't paying 'extra' and including holiday pay in that. I was adding that amount to a 'pot' on my spreadsheet, and whenever they took a break I paid them the first week they weren't working.

anitamarie

Now I'm very confused. I'm about to start taking students and was going to do the 'rolled up' thing as recommended by a University's career service as this is how they pay their casual staff. I shall find it laughably ironic if having signed their code of conduct they're actually being naughty in their own practices!

Savvy_Sue

I do think there are a few exceptions to the rolled-up holiday pay thing - there's been a recent thread about it and we have discussed it before that as well. But that was on the Employment board, so scoot over there and have a look - it was a chap who invigilates exams.

I know that if you CAN roll it up, it has to be absolutely transparent and shown separately on their payslips - you can't say "your pay is £5 per hour and that includes holiday pay" or "gross pay £50 including holiday pay".

AND I think people do HAVE to take a break at some point in the year - you can't do it to get out of GIVING annual paid leave, even if people WANT to work 52 weeks a year.

One reason I did it by keeping a note and paying it whenever they took a break was to keep down the National Insurance bill (for them and for me!) It makes no difference to how much tax is due over time, but because NI is calculated per week or month, we would both have had to pay NI if we'd gone over the Lower Earnings Limit. And my staff were sometimes borderline to the LEL.