Posted: Thursday 2 December 2010
Snow News
As the snow continues to fall all around Scotland and cause chaos to commuters, I am receiving a number of questions on the rights of employers and employees in these unprecedented (well at least since last year!) weather conditions.
For those with questions, the Acas guidance is particularly useful.
Summarising the situation:-
Look at your contracts and employee handbook to see if the situation is specifically provided for.
- If it is not, then our view is that employees are not entitled to be paid when they haven’t attended for work.
- If employees wish to be paid for the time, then they should use any annual leave which they have outstanding from that leave year.
- If they have no unused leave to take, then you can either take a strict view and refuse to pay, or you could come to an arrangement for the time to be made up later.
- If that doesn’t work for your business, then if you provide more leave than the statutory minimum 28 days, you could allow those extra days to be used in advance.
- Be aware that if you allow leave from the next year to be used and it eats into the statutory 28 days, then you may face a later claim for breach of the Working Time Regulations, which provide that 20 days’ paid leave must be allowed in the holiday year in which they fall and the extra 8 days should also be allowed in that year, although an agreement may provide for them to be carried forward into the next year (ie not backwards).
- Many schools and nurseries are closed. If people have difficulty making it to work because of lack of childcare arrangements then they are entitled to take time off under the legislation dealing with Emergency Time Off for Dependents. Such time off is unpaid. They should not be treated detrimentally for doing this but, equally, the time allowed is only what is “reasonable and necessary”. They are supposed to try to use that time off to make other arrangements for their childcare.
- Bear in mind that how reasonably you deal with these types of scenarios often has an impact on the “psychological contract” with your employees. There is a balance to be struck between not paying employees for a relatively short period and the longer term impact that that might have (eg recruitment costs, drop in productivity due to reduced motivation etc).
Looking out my window, the roads do seem a lot quieter than normal so I suspect that most businesses are being affected by the weather. But the Employment Team are here so if you have any questions, please let us know.
In the meantime, I’m off to build a snowman!
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