Employment Law

[BMS]

Hi All

Any employment law experts here...

Please PM me if you can help with the following scenario...............

Client X has decided to change the pay frequency of it's employees from monthly to weekly but without informing !!

My gut reaction is that they should have given written confirmation of this to their employees at least 1 month prior to it happpening (1 month being the original pay period)

They also seem to be bit concerned that they will have employees coming to them saying that they have had DD/SO's returned because of the changes...My guess is that they should be worried as they are morally if not legally obliged to meet these claims as it was down to their payroll changes causing the problem..

Any advice would be gratefully received especially if you can point me to the relevant employment law.

Thanks all

 

[kyber]

Were they being paid in advance before? (If so, I can understand why they might be upset but if they were paid in arrears, surely they are better off.)

When you are paid is a contractual issue (need to check the contracts of course) and employees must be consulted and agree to changes before such changes are made. (There are of course ways of encouraging employees to accept new contracts but that does not seem to have been attempted here.)

No doubt someone up-to-date on the law will be along in a moment.

Stuart

PS. My employer pays one month in advance. This is unique to the UK for the organisation to the best of my knowledge and also very unusual. Most companies pay in arrears. Nice on your first day, but nasty when you leave the company. It has been suggested to me that this was because when there were government restrictions on pay increase many years ago switching from arears to advance effectively gave everyone a pay rise (sort of).

 

[Stephen]

The employees should indeed have been given written notice (at least a month) of the proposed changes, with feedback requested if the changes would cause anyone any problems.

The employee's contracts would have some bearing on this, but it would likely be considered unreasonable of the employer not to have given some notice of the change.

An employee could claim a fundamental breach of contract and make a claim against the company. To help avoid this, it would probably be reasonable for the company to consider reimbursing any bank charges faced by the employees.

Also, if there are 150 or more employees, the company should also have formally consulted about the changes first.

This is of course general guidance without knowing the specifics, but hopefully helps. Feel free to send me a PM if you need more detailed info.

Steve