Hi Rebecca

It may be very necessary to know the exact wording of these contracts that determines working hours etc

In reply to David:

Hi David,

Thanks for your response,

The exact wording is... The Companys operational hours are from 9am to 2am Monday - Saturday. Your normal working hours are XX per week. Hours each week to be worked flexibly between the above hours in accordance with the weekly roster.

Which in my eyes, look like a set amount of hours for a set amount of pay.

They are pretty adamant the contracts should remain hourly, so I feel I need to recommend to rephrase that whole paragraph to be more along the lines of, 'you are employed on an hourly basis, therefore there are no specified working hours and you will only be paid for the hours you work, according to the rota'.. something like that.

My concern, is some of these employees have been working 50 hours avg on a consistent basis for years, which I feel warrants a full-time contract. Or I suppose, when they do build up continuous employment they will be entitled to more rights as what a FT employee would be.

Sorry for the ramble! appreciate your advice.

In reply to Rebecca:

Rebecca

The wording of the contract doesn't look that off to me.

There are very many hourly paid employees in this world who are on permanent full-time contracts - we have many in our contact centre operations. The contract is for 40 hours per week with working any 5 from 7 days between the hours of 7.00am and 10.00pm subject to rota which is a mix of early, middle and late. Supplements are paid to the hourly rate for evening and weekend working.

Not every role is salaried but that doesn't mean hourly paid employees do not have a permanent full-time (or part-time) contract.

In reply to Robert James Munro:

Thanks Robert, that's great

It’s common in retail to have store teams except management on hourly paid contracts.
Schedules are designed to meet the customer demand so one week so may only need someone for 20 hours and then for 30.
Hourly paid does not mean zero hours at all. Reta also lends itself to a lot of part time team members who want to work less hours at some points for exams or study leave and work more in the holidays.
If they’re consistently working 50 hours a week, then I would say it’s more a staffing issue.

In reply to Rebecca:

Hi Rebecca

I’d fully agree with your interpretations, except that I can’t understand your reference to building up continuous employment - only if they’d very clearly been totally casual whereby their employment contracts began again and ended every time each and every instance of casual employment came to an end would this conceivably apply. That clearly hasn’t been the case, so they already have continuous employment from the date those contracts began.

Ultimately it would be for a Tribunal to decide whether or not their ‘normal working hours’ and their obligations to work them constitute a right to be paid for such hours, even if no work were ever available but, in the absence of any contractual short time working clause I’d think like you that it would.

Furthermore, their normal weekly pay assuming their employment is continuous for most purposes would be based on their normal weekly earnings.

In reply to David:

Thanks again David

In reply to LRequena:

Thank you!

Hi Rebecca
I worked in retail for 20 years and judging by the wording you posted below, my view would be this.

- the contract wording of "Your normal working hours are XX per week. Hours each week to be worked flexibly between the above hours in accordance with the weekly roster." Is pretty standard in most retail environments as often employee availability and staffing levels vary each week due to the time/ day/week/month of the year.

E.g. you'll need more people in work on a saturday/Sunday than week day, and at lunch than 1st thing in the morning. Equally November December will usually need 1.5 -2 x the staff of say August due to sales volume. If people are on permanent fixed hours every week/day then this flex isn't possible.

Secondly the contracts are permanent (judging by this wording) and are not zero hours as they are stipulating the number of hours the firm will guarantee each week. E.g. 16hrs, 20 hrs, 30 etc. This means the person is guaranteed those as a minimum. If it was zero hours, it would say that. Hence they are on a salary of those hours on x amount per hour.

Finally, I agree with a previous comment- the issue isn't the contract wording, the problem is the 50 hr weeks. The max people should be working, unless they've signed the waiver, is 48 with the working time directive. Before doing anything I'd get your friend to check if employees have signed the waivers or not. If they haven't, then the firm is probably breaching that particular law. If they have signed it though (and this is most often the case) then the employee has waived their legal right, and there's nothing wrong.

In reply to Annabel:

Thank you, Annabel.

In reply to Annabel:

Thanks so much Annabel :)