On Call Times

[Lollen9920]

Hi,
Hoping you can shed some light in legality of operstion and times on the below.

A night worker finishes their shift at 6am.
They then go on call from 6pm Friday night. Working from home with laptop and mobile.

Due to the number of calls. The downtime they have is:
Saturday Morning: 5 hours
Sunday morning: 4 hours

They do not sleep between Sunday morning at 5am till Monday morning at 6.15am when on call ends. Again high frequency of calls.
They started their normal shift at 6pm Monday night.

They want to know where they stand with sleep and downtime arrangements and pay.
They get a set fee for the weekend which is less than what their hourly rate would be for working the same hours in office.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Mr D]

Ok that's a lot of calls on Sunday and Monday.

The pay they have got for on call - is it contracted? is it at least minimum wage?
On call pay rates can be different. Can be lower or higher than regular pay, if contracted.

 

[Lollen9920]

Yeah, is one of the more inundated weekends.. polite way of putting that maybe. Follow up emails etc have been in with their working time. They've come back to say they had a total of 37.5 hours down time total over the weekend. Could be an hour here, 30 mins there.

They have agreed to help out as we are short staffed. But it's the same as if they were contracted to do so. Works out for the whole 60 hour weekend at £7.75 an hour. Hours actually worked.
22.25 hours of working time works out at £20.90 ish an hour.

 

[Newchodge]

Sounds like a breach of both Working Time Regs and NMW. Tell them to join a union.

 

[Lollen9920]

Sounds like a breach of both Working Time Regs and NMW. Tell them to join a union.

Thanks for the help, will tell them to find one.