14th June 2013, 01:42 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:But it would appear to be of concern to HMRC....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/j...law-on-pay
Sorry I think my wording made what I meant ambiguous. Minimum wage law is concerned if you are paid less than minimum wage and clearly defines what hours count as time work in order to make sure that you are being paid minimum for all the hours you do, this includes travel during the working day. What is not clear is if the law regarding what counts as work time for minimum wage purposes also extend to those people being paid more than minimum, that is, if I am paid £10 an hour over a forty hour week but am not paid the £12.50 that I am owed because my employer requires me to be on site 15 minutes earlier than my official start time (Under minimum wage law this time would count as work time because I am required to be at work at this time by my employer) do these laws on work time extend to me, even though I receive more than minimum? It's not clear whether they do.
I had a similar problem when I worked in a job where I was paid for output. Minimum wage law requires that output work be set at a fair piece rate so that a person working at below average output can still make minimum. The company I worked for did in fact have work that was not rated fairly and the pay was below minimum but by giving this work to higher output employees and mixing it with jobs that paid a fair rate we would still receive minimum over the pay period. So we lost unfairly on the underpaid projects, projects that would not pay minimum if you were to work on nothing else for the entire pay period, but we could not do anything because the fairer paid projects would bring your pay up to minimum. In fact higher output employees could end up receiving less pay than lower output workers because higher output workers got the slower jobs.