UNISON have supported the Supreme Court judgement that guarantees minimum paid annual leave for all workers
The Supreme Court has ruled that some workers holiday entitlement will change. Ms. Brazel, a term time, zero hour contract music teacher, made a claim for underpayment of holiday pay. The employer paid her at 12.07% of her annual earnings, she claimed the calculation should have been based on her average earnings over the past 12 weeks, whilst she was at work. Now, it's no longer just your full-year staff who are entitled to 5.6 weeks' annual holiday. You need to provide this for all part year staff, even if they don't work for you all year round. This includes staff on:
Zero-hour contracts
Seasonal contracts
Variable-hour contracts
Term-time only contracts
Casual contracts
Agency contracts
Which means you may need to change the way you calculate leave entitlement for certain workers and without updating your HR procedures or staff contracts, you could be at risk for unlawful deduction of wages. Up until now, you may have used the '12.07% method' to calculate staff holiday leave and pay (statutory holiday entitlement of 5.6 weeks is wqual to 12.07% of the total hours worked in a year). So, to calculate holiday leave previously, you might have multiplied 12.07% by the hours, days or weeks your employee worked. This has now been ruled as unfair and falling below the statutory requirement under the Working Time Regulations, typically for zero hour or term time contracts. From Now On... If you hire a part-year staff, to calculate holiday entitlement, you will need to find an average of your staff weekly earnings from the previous 52 weeks they worked. If you have staff who only work part of the year but have a year-long contract, you'll need to ignore the weeks they haven't worked. You will not be able to apply a pro-rata reduction. Make sure you:
Change the method of calculating holiday pay
Change your leave entitlement - to make sure all staff have statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks of holiday
Tell staff about the changes
Review and update your staff contracts
Review and update your policies to offer all staff 5.6 weeks' paid leave
Compensate staff for holidays where you may have underpaid them
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