Is any of this legal?

eXGEN

I quit my job a few months ago due to working conditions being changed for the worse and also wanting to point my career in a different direction. The company I worked for are a small company with about 15-20 people working for them. I was the longest person in the company at the time I quit and had worked pretty hard to get the company the reputation it had. The company started to have money problems because of non payment from a company that we were doing work for.

Around this time the director starting putting about half the company on short time and also said on the 18th May that all overtime worked this month would not be paid even though we had worked for 2/3 of the month not knowing this. He did say that he would try and back pay everyone who was owed extra hours but this has not yet happened to some employees while it has to others. He basically back paid the people he didn’t want to quit and didn’t pay the people he could do without. Can he just make this change to our contracts by sending everyone an email?

I confronted the director about this and let him know that I was not happy with this at all and was not willing to work any overtime without pay. He said that I should do my best not to work them even though I was contracted into another company who he was getting a day rate from and this rate had not changed but I was making a lot less now due to not getting the overtime.

I gave him my notice a few weeks later and had worked overtime up to the time I left. It can be one thing to say that I should just finish up and drive home after 8 hours worked but this would give me a very bad reputation in my industry which is very small and I would know a lot of people in it so I thought this would be terrible for my reputation and prospects of getting work in the future.
The job is a high pressure job were work has to be complete by the end of the day so this means that you can have to work on a lot of extra hours to get the job finished. It also involved extensive travel as almost everyone is based within 20mins of the M50 yet the work can be anywhere in the ROI. With this in mind the average day is about 12 hours.

One of the guys that work there was put on short time without any new contract issued or signed. He was getting paid for 8 hours for his day and some weeks could be working 5 days and the next could be none. This guy has worked approx 110 hours overtime since he stopped being paid for it (bearing in mind that he was working about 2-3 days per week) and was told this week that he would not be getting paid this money back. He also took 3 days holidays in August and when he got this payslip this month he didn't get paid for the bank holiday or the 3 days off with no mention ever from the employer that he was no longer getting paid for his holidays. In August he had worked the full month apart from the 3 days holidays and the bank holiday.

This guy has asked for meeting with the boss but he would cancel them or postpone them because the employer had to go on 2 weeks holidays. This guy is now afraid that if he complains to much or says that he is not willing to work the time that his employers answer will be, "Nobody is making you work here and you are free to leave" putting him in a terrible situation in this current economic climate.

The employer is also saying that he will not put this person on a first aid course and took him off a manual handling course recently for no reason even though these are very appropriate to the job.

What options does this person have and do the guys that work here have any entitlement to being paid the money that they were owed seeing as nobody has signed any new contracts? Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this. Thank you for reading

premier10

Hi

Your story is absolutely brutal, unfortunately i'm not an expert in the area of employment law. However i assure you, you guys need to talk to an employment law solicitor. That boss is a chancer treating people like that, hoping they'll work for nothing or just piss off.

Sorry i can't be of any better help.