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As an employer, your employees will not always be full-time workers. For example, you may not have enough work in a specific area of your business for a role to be suitable for a full-time worker. Or perhaps your business does not run five days a week, so you cannot offer roles for full-time workers. Whatever your reason, if you employ part-time workers, there are some key points to be aware of to ensure you carry out your responsibilities as an employer correctly. This article will explain part-time work and some critical issues you should consider, such as treating part-time employees equally.
What is a Part-Time Worker?
There is no legal definition of a part-time worker. However, when staff members work part-time, they work fewer hours than a comparable full-time worker. A full-time employee’s regular working hours are at least 35 hours per week, although some consider 30 hours full-time. Consequently, your part-time employees work less than 30-35 hours per week.
There are different ways of working part-time. For example, an employee may work term time only or share the role with another. They may work fewer days per week than your full-time member of staff or fewer hours per day. In this sense, part-time is fairly flexible.
Employing Part-Time Employees
The following are some key points you should be aware of when employing part-time staff members. This is not an exhaustive list, but it will give you some crucial issues you should note.
Why Employ Staff on a Part-Time Basis?
Many wish to work on a part-time basis. For example, parents with young children, semi-retired workers, and students who need to balance work and study may want to work part-time. As an employer, you may employ staff part-time to reduce costs to your business or for flexibility during a period of growth.
Equal Treatment
When you employ part-time staff, you must treat them equally to your full-time staff in terms of the benefits you provide them. The law protects your part-time staff against less-favourable treatment than their equivalent full-time workers. For part-time workers, their benefits apply on a pro-rata basis. This includes their:
- rate of pay which includes sick pay as well as pay for maternity, paternity and adoption leave;
- holiday leave and pay;
- career break options;
- travel allowance;
- pension benefits and opportunities;
- development towards their career, which includes training opportunities; and
- selection for promotion, transfer or redundancy
Whilst you should generally treat your part-time employees equally to their full-time counterparts, there are situations where you are allowed to treat them differently. However, where you do, you must demonstrate an ‘objective justification’ which is a good reason for treating them differently.
Overtime
Whilst your part-time workers will work fewer hours than your full-time workers when they increase their hours, this does not always result in overtime pay. Ultimately, part-time workers may only receive an overtime rate of pay once their hours exceed the regular hours of your full-time workers.
Swapping Between Full-time and Part-Time Hours
Once your employee is working for you part-time, you are not legally allowed to require them to work full-time hours.
However, when your full-time staff request to move to part-time work, you are legally required to consider their request when making it a flexible working request. Your employees can make a flexible working request where they have:
- worked for you for a minimum of 26 weeks in a row; and
- a reason for doing so, such as to care for their child or an adult who needs care.
While you are legally required to consider any flexible working request, you are not legally required to accept it but must explain why you do not agree.
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Key Takeaways
Employing part-time workers is not as simple as employing a person for fewer hours than a full-time staff member. When employing part-time staff, you are legally required to treat them no less favourably than their full-time equivalent staff. This means their pay, pension benefits, and holiday leave should be equal in proportion to the hours worked. However, there are times when you can treat part-time staff unequally, but you must have an objective justification for doing so.
If you need help understanding the key points to be aware of when employing part-time employees in England and Wales, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no legal definition of a part-time employee or worker, and there are no set hours to define one. So instead, any member of your staff who works less than the standard full-time hours for your business (generally between 30-35 hours per week) is considered a part-time staff member.
As an employer, you are legally obligated to treat your part-time staff no less favourably than your full-time equivalent staff unless you have an objective justification for doing so.
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