Cleaning companies and cleaning contractors have to adhere to all employment legislation and making sure you are adhering to employment law is a must but office cleaning companies need to make sure any casual workers they use get their full employment entitlements and rights. We look a few of the ways you can do this.

There are a number of issues to face for workers who are less regular.

Firstly the Equal Pay Act says that people should be paid the same for the same, or broadly similar, work. There is also a recent principle (actually for BA pilots) that confirmed that leave pay should be based on average actual earnings.

But what about those really useful people that are friends of the business and are called in as and when to cover shortfalls in workforce availability? Because they are only paid when they work there is a danger that you may forget that they are entitled to paid holidays in the same way as other staff – a legal entitlement.

There are a number of ways to handle this. A popular one is to say that a cleaner works 47 weeks and has 5 weeks off (for example). So the casual cleaner who comes in when needed can be paid 1 + 5/47 of the cleaner’s hourly rate, and this ensures that they are getting paid a bit of leave for each hour they work. Doesn’t it??

Well yes, it does. But the Working time Directive also requires you to be sure that employees take the leave that they are entitled to under the law. This method doesn’t really do anything about ensuring that.

Another way seems more complex, but has actually worked well in practice. Here is a worked example:

Calculate the holiday ratio. For example if staff are normally entitled to five weeks holiday and 8 days bank holidays:

Holiday days in the year – 25 holiday plus 8 bank holiday = 33 days

Working days in the year – 52.143 weeks times 5 days = 260.715

Holiday ratio is therefore 33/260.715 = 12.66%

So, consider a casual worker who has worked 36 hours in a month

Hours worked in the month – 36

36 hours times the holiday ratio 12.66% = 4.56 hours holiday owing

You need to then keep a running total of the holiday hours owing, and at any time an hourly paid member of staff can tell you that they want to add some holiday hours to their pay for the month.

This then gives the clear advantage that on your pay records a casual member of staff is paid for some time they haven’t attended work – ie paid leave – and it also gives you an easy method of ensuring that their statutory leave gets used up. Both could be very useful if you ever get challenged to show how you are complying with the Working Time Directive!

Ensuring you meet UK and European employment law is of course statutory but is getting increasingly more and more complex, if you do employ any casual cleaning staff make sure you check with the above and keep an eye out for any employment law changes.

Daniel Stiller runs a London based Office Cleaning Company providing cleaning services in the UK which is now one of the UK leading Cleaning Companies

Daniel Stiller runs a London based Office Cleaning and Contract Cleaning Company which provide cleaning services in the UK http://www.ics-online.co.uk/

Author Bio: Daniel Stiller runs a London based Office Cleaning Company providing cleaning services in the UK which is now one of the UK leading Cleaning Companies

Category: Home Management
Keywords: office cleaning, cleaning companies, office cleaners, office cleaning company