work contract

[paddypaddy]

I have been employed with the health service for 22 years, on a permanent contract with up to 37 hours, but if no hours I do not get paid, over the 20 years I have worked on a rota and was always hours available. I have been of on long term sickness with severe depression and my doctor has said I am well to go back to work, but my employer has told me he has know hours available, I pay into their pension and have signed a paper that I would do no work elsewhere whilel I was working for them. Where do I stand, am I entitled to redundancy or wait until more hours become available. I think they want rid of me as I have a disability now. please help as I feel all this is causing me to get depressed again thanks

[Eloise01]

Re: work contract

This is, based on the information here, an exceptionally complex matter and if you are not in a trades union then you must see a solicitor who is an employment specialist as soon as possible. The one thing that is almost certain is that this is not a redundancy situation - there is not evidence that your position is redundant. The problem is that your contractual position is complicated. You cannot both have a "permanent" contract and a "zero hours contract". The two things are entirely different. The former is a contract of employment and the latter is not - it is a contract for service and gives you few employment rights. At the same time, the document saying that you would work nowhere else would be in breach of the criteria for the existence of a zero hours contract. But all that aside, you have no guaranteed hours of work and so there is no obligation on the employer to provide any.

These circumstances are going to have to be examined in detail. You cannot simply say that you think someone is discriminating against you. The employer is under no obligation to provide you with hours, and you have been on long term sickness during which time the hours still needed working and it is likely that they have simply now got someone else doing those hours. Not having the hours when no hours are guaranteed is not discrimination. THis is not a situation which will be resolved by some free advice on a website.

By the way, what happened to the investigation and disciplinary matters from before you went off sick? Do these circumstances provide any explanation for why your employer has said they have no hours to offer you, rather than discrimination?

[Eloise01]

Re: work contract

On thinking about this further, I would have to point out that the last thing you want is for them to make you redundant anyway! Since you are on (as far as I can determine from the infoirmation here) a variable hours contract with no guaranteed hours, the only method of determining the weekly wage to be used in the calculation would be the average of the last 12 weeks wages. Since you appear not to have been in work since November, and you do not get paid when not in work (I assume therefore you have no contractual sick pay), that would mean that the average of your last twelve weeks wages would be zero, since there is no basic wage to use for the calculation. And as a consequence, your redundancy pay would also be zero.