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Can Employers Insist On Paying For Certain Days Annual Leave.

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RATTER15 | 08:12 Sat 06th Sep 2014 | Law
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Just a curiosity really?

I work 4 or more days a week every week, I then book AL. for 3 weeks. my employes are saying that I will be paid for the full 21 days and those 21 days will be deducted from my holiday entitlement, even though only 12 of those days were actually working days.

can they legally do that?

In our contract it only mentions the amount of AL we are entitled to and how much notice we must give etc.
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Fair enough. I tried. Do let us know the outcome.
Ratter,

Having tried to follow everything said, and getting rather confused, I've attached the link to the ACAS Holiday and Holiday Pay document, which is what I used to refer to when discussing this matter with my part time staff, although we didn't work weekends, but this doesn't really make any difference to the overall concept:

http://www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/d/4/Holidays-and-holiday-pay.pdf

Assuming that your contract states that you work 4 days during the 7 day working week, your minimum amount of holidays due over the course of a year is 4 times 5.6 days, which equals 22.4 days.

Working overtime , either at the end of your shift, or on your normal days off, makes no difference to your holiday entitlement.

If your contract states that you are entitled to 28 days holiday over the course of the holiday year, then your employers are being generous, as this is the minimum entitlement of a full time worker (they may have made a mistake and issued you with a contract for a full timer in error, not realising the difference!), or have you earned extra holiday due to length of service?

Whether paid Bank Holidays are included within your holiday entitlement should be covered within your contract, especially working within an area which cannot shut down for a day. Having worked within the Financial Services sector for all my working life, obviously we would shut down on Bank Holidays as far a customers were concerned, although I would often have to work due to systems testing and implementation, but we would be paid at an appropriate rate - this was before the Working Time Directive and minimum holidays!

I would argue that if you take a week off on holiday, this represents 4 working days only, as per contract and that you were entitled to a minimum of 5.6 such periods, or 7 should your contract actually stipulate 28 days annual leave.
Thanks builder.

Twix, I believe you are treating Ratter's situation too much like "normal", but it isn't normal at all (i.e. what most of us who don't work in his sector are used to). "Normal" would be that if somebody took a week's holiday, they would be paid for 5 days. But in Ratter's case, he would be paid for 7 days.

I think it's highly likely that Ratter's employer knows what they are doing and that they are right. Therefore I see this exercise more as figuring out what they're doing and any upside for Ratter, rather than leading Ratter to believe that they don't know what they are doing and perhaps getting him to make trouble for himself.

The fact is that the employer is going to pay Ratter for all 21 days he is away, not just some of them. Therefore all of those days will be paid holiday. This is different to the "norm" when a typical employee is not paid for the weekends that they are on holiday.
If you work a 5 day week and book 1 weeks leave, that leave should be 5 days off of your annual entitlement if you book 2 weeks leave then this should be 10 days off your annual entitlement not 14 days as I am assuming you are saying.
Haven't read all the posts, yet, but I've never heard of that. We only booked the days we "should" have been working as Annual Leave. If you worked in an office, you don't lose two days of AL every weekend.
Nor do you get paid for them ...
I too share Ellipses view that although the arrangement seems highly unusual the employer may indeed know what they are doing. Although they are making a 5 day a week employee take 7 days from their holiday entitlement when they take a week off they are paying them 7 days not 5. That means of course the employer may be not be meeting the statutory minimum requiring holidays, but I have a feeling there is some devil in the detail here or a misunderstanding.
We cannot resolve it- only the employees, the trade union (if any) and the employer can sort this out, with ACAS input if needed
Thinking about this Ratter could it be that though you only work 4 days a week the other 3 days are regarded as 'on call' days? I know of someone who has this system if he wants an 'on call ' day off he has to book it as holiday. Never occurred to me to ask if he gets paid booking an 'on call ' day as holiday. The company explain it by saying that if he is not available 'on call' they have to arrange another person to be 'on call' instead. Do you get an allowance for being 'on call'?
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No EDDIE I'm not on call. It appears that my employers are changing our contracts now, so we will not be employed or paid by the day and our holiday entitlement will be worked out by the hour not the day. I will wait and see what our contract s say and I will let you know, its all very confusing.
At the last merger of the company I work for the holiday entitlement started to be set in hours not days. I find it non-instinctive (I have to work out how many days I actually have left) and one doesn't take an hour off anyway. And since start & finish times tend to be flexible which is longer, the morning or the afternoon ? IMO the change was an act of insanity, something all too common these days in all areas of life.
Employers have to calculate holiday in hours when employees are contracted to work shifts of differing lengths. I made this point in my first long post at 09.34 yesterday.
Payroll is wrong. If they insist they are right get them to put their reasoning in writing and talk to ACAS. Your annual leave entitlement, if you work irregular hours, should be calculated on an average of the last 13 weeks. But that is for pay purposes, not for calculating how much annual leave you have taken.
Let us know how you get on when you ring ACAS.
Well, not the case in my place of work buildersmate, but maybe in Ratter's.
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We had a staff meeting yesterday and our Director tried explaining all this nonsense, I didn't understand much of what he was going on about to be honest. He now says that we must take holidays 5 days = 1 week at a time except in exceptional circumstances. Some staff are creating as they only work 2 days a week but they must now take 5 days at a time holiday.
Still worth pursuing this with ACAS. It in not unlawful (note double negative) to constrain the taking of holidays for business reasons. For example, many businesses close over Xmas and staff have to take leave.

But this is a change in terms and conditions of employment and employers must consult, as well as give contractual notice of any eventually-decided change. Having a staff meeting to announce the change doesn't count as consultation.

In any case, the business reason for this seems non-existent.
Which uses up AL quicker for PT workers.!!

If you only work 2 days you should only have 2 days holiday.

I would definately be checking what they are saying.

Twix. you will not be able to discern any central thread or theme in all the answers here - because there isnt one. Not as bad as the Republic of Lydberg, four Boers, three parties and five opinions (1900) but you may get the idea.

Ratter it is possible also that your employer ( incredibly ) doesnt know the law on this either. The local hospital ( CMFT ) got it wrong on discrimination ( £106k to Elliott Brown ) and then got it wrong on changing contracts to the ancillary staff ( £125k to ancillary staff ) and THEN got it wrong on changing doctors contracts ( £135k costs - their own and the doctors', because they really got their law wrong on that one )

so for spending £300k of your tax money they got absolutely nothing -
no one resigned or retired or was fired of course. They're all out there still at their posts.

anyway good luck
agree BM - ring ACAS - very helpful ( so a bit like HMRC in that respect)
I agree with cassa. Ratter, as you know, I've worked in similar places with similar shift patterns and we've only ever used the AL that we would have actually worked. I'm not convinced it's even legal for your 2 dayers to be having less holiday than everyone else (pro rata anyway).

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