Legal pay entitlements for summer workers

Mr. CooL ICE

If a student who working a 39hr week (8:30-5, 0.5 hr taken for lunch, and finish at 4 on fridays. uses clock-in system) in a factory workshop for the summer, and started mid-June, and got their pay slip for last week (mon 7th - fri 11th), being a 4-day week, due to the bank holiday, and discovered they only got paid for 31 hours. The student then asked other summer workers, and they had all been paid 39 hours appropriately.

First of all, would the student, who never signed a contract in the first place, be legally entitled to bank holiday pay, considering they would never have taken a day off in the two months that they worked there? And if the student asked about this to the person who operates wages, and was forced to back off with a threat to dock all the other students' wages, can the wages operator dock another summer workers bank holiday pay as reason of mistake?

All students work 8:30-5:00 monday to friday, and all permanent staff use the clock-in system too.

Edit -> <mod edit - yep, danke>

Thirdfox

Legal advice can't be given on this forum.

Only hypothetical cases may be posed.

Mod's going to lock this soon.

Thirdfox

Oasis.ie has lots of useful information about employment law though (just general advice!)

Mr. CooL ICE

Oops, ok. Ignore/delete/lock as necessary then

hullaballoo

I'll give you one day to edit it appropriately. I'm more willing to allow something like this stand as it's more generally acceptible to advise someone who is in a stand-alone position such as workers and consumers.

It's tricky enough to find out about stuff like this without help, so maybe some helpful advice would be useful here. Thanks for the vigilance anyway.

Victor

Part time / temporary workers tend to be paid for their bank holidays as a percentage of earnings ofer the preceeding 13(?) weeks. As you probably haven't been there for 13 weeks, your average is lower. but see oasis.gov.ie

Crash

I get paid for my bank holidays specifically (in fact at a double time rate) and i'm part time/temp. don't quite know tbh...

gilroyb

In this imaginary situation, you will have worked enough time over the proceeding month to be elegible for bank holiday pay. The lack of a contract is not an issue, if a company has you working for them, they have to pay you in accordance with employment law.

Oasis

There are nine (9) public holidays in Ireland each year. Good Friday is not a public holiday. The list of public holidays in Ireland each year is as follows:

New Year's Day (1 January)
St. Patrick's Day (17 March)
Easter Monday
First Monday in May, June, August
Last Monday in October
Christmas Day (25 December)
St. Stephen's Day (26 December)
Most employees are entitled to have paid leave on public holidays. One exception is part-time employees who have not worked at least 40 hours in total in the five weeks before the public holiday.

Employees who qualify will be entitled to either the public holiday off as paid leave or one of the following alternatives:

A paid day off within a month of the public holiday
An additional day of annual leave
An additional day's pay
The nearest church holiday to the public holiday as a paid day off
The Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997 provides that you may ask your employer at least 21 days before a public holiday, which of the alternatives will apply. If your employer fails to respond at least 14 days before the public holiday, you are entitled to take the actual public holiday as a paid day off

Part-time employees who are entitled to public holiday leave, but who are not due to work on that particular day should receive 1/5 (20%) of their weekly pay instead of the actual day's leave.

Gobán Saor

The imaginary student employees ARE entitled to their imaginary and entirely hypothetical public holiday. The threshold is 40 hours work in the preceeding 5 weeks.

They are also entitled to annual leave or pay in lieu on termination at the rate of 1/3 working week (1.66 days) per month worked. So 3 months summer work gets you one (hypothetical!) weeks annual leave.

Lack of a written or signed contract is quite irrelevant (and may in itself be an offence by the employer under the Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act)

Failure of the employer to grant any of these entitlements can be enforced by bringing a case to a Rights Commissioner in the Labour Relations Commission. This is a free service and operates quite informally; trade unions bring most cases but self represented applicants are welcome and encouraged. Further info from www.lrc.ie

Mr. CooL ICE

Sorry to raise this old topic, but...

part-time employees who have not worked at least 40 hours in total in the five weeks before the public holiday

If this summer worker was to have worked 39 hours each week for the five weeks preceding the bank holiday. Since this does not reach the requirement of 40 hours per week, would this summer worker not be entitled to the bank holiday pay because of this?

gilroyb

You've misunderstood. It's not per week, it's in total. It's not 40 hours per week over the five weeks, but the equivalent of 8 hours per week in the five weeks before the bank holiday.

Bank holiday pay is available to almost all workers, not just standard working week workers.

padser

LordChessington wrote:

First of all, would the student, who never signed a contract in the first place, be legally entitled to bank holiday pay,
>

As above, I dont know the precise cut off point but you need to have worked for a certain amount of time to be entitled to bank holiday pay. It would appear you have worked sufficiently.

LordChessington wrote:

And if the student asked about this to the person who operates wages, and was forced to back off with a threat to dock all the other students' wages, can the wages operator dock another summer workers bank holiday pay as reason of mistake?
>

Short answer is no, certainly if there has been no contract signed then the employer can not dock wages FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.

There are specific reasons that employers can dock wages but a pre requisit is that it is in the employees contract.


What I would suggest to such a student would be to wait until they have finished working and then claim back bank holiday pay from the company. The best way to do this would be to call in and personally deliver a letter requesting it. For the small amount due they will probably just pay up, you could of course access the employee appeals tribunal or report the employer to the governement dept ( I think its called the labour relations commission) who send out officers to check over their books.