Hi Emily and welcome to the forums.

You may want to ask yourself the reverse question... If  full time people need to work 40 hours every week before receiving any benefit, they will legitimately  compare themselves to  a person contracted to work 4 hours a week who only needs to work 7 hours a week to qualify for the same benefit. From their point of view this will not be fair either.

Pushing the logic to it's extreme, a part-timer with 5 distinct PT contracts of 4 hours/day could clock up 15 hours of qualifying time by working 7 hours every day in the same week (ie 5x3 qualifying hours). That too would not be fair.

IMHO if comparable proportional treatment is to be achieved (in the same way as holiday entitlements for part timers) it could be along the lines of :

1. Normal working hours are 37 hours/week, and for every hour worked in excess of 40hours, an hour of time off will be awarded
2. Your working hours need to go beyond 40/37 of contracted hours to qualify for 1/37 of contracted hours in time off
3. If someone has 10 contracted hours per week, they will need to work 40/37x10 hours=10,81 hours to start acquiring time off
4. For ever period of 0.81 hours worked beyond 10.81 hours,this will give 1/37 of 10 hours = 0.27 hours in time off (16.21 minutes for every 48.65 minutes)
5. Round the cutoff up to 11 hours pers week and this equates to giving 20 minutes off for every hour worked beyond the 11 hour per week

HI Emily - you are correct and the employer is unnecessarily opening itself up to a big risk of not only a claim of unfair treatment under the Part time workers (prevention of unfair treatment) regulations, but also indirect sex discrimination (it is more likely that more women than men will be part time and therefore unable to qualify for the 'bonus'). Given that people can make a claim whilst remaining employed and tribunal fess have now been removed, they would be very unwise to take that risk. Any half decent Solicitor is going to very quickly point out to a Tribunal Judge, that by saying that people only qualify if they have done more than 37 hours, they have in effect, very clearly set up a bonus scheme that people can only qualify for if they work full time. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one who had to try and argue my way out of that one.

Notwithstanding the legal risk, they don't seem to have thought this through - do they really want to reward people for working long hours? That doesn't sound a very healthy culture. The number of hours someone works doesn't always reflect their actual performance or output and introducing such a scheme could just encourage people to do very unproductive extra hours to qualify for the extra time off over Christmas.

A scheme that includes everyone (which may be based on organisational performance if preferred, and can be pro-rata'd for part time colleagues), would be much more likely to motivate and engage staff.

Good luck!

I must say I am with Ray on this. I don't think there is a huge legal rusk ( although I can coherently make the arguments both ways) and many organisations have rules tha clearly set out a set number of hours that have to be worked before special payments or rates apply rather than just exceeding contractual hours.

Btw can't quite see why this is linked to Christmas? Unless it's only applicable at one time of year?

In reply to Keith:

Thanks for your response!
Christmas is our peak time, where working overtime is expected so it's a seasonal reward for employees working extra.

In reply to Emily:

Welcome to the communities Emily. And congratulations for the first Xmas post this year.

In reply to David Perry:

Yes, welcome Emily. Extra *Like* for mentioning Christmas.