Most of the law regulating employment contracts is based on common (judgemade) law, which lays down the obligations of the parties to the contract. However, under the Employment Rights Act 1996 employers have two specific legal duties:

This section explains how these rights apply.

YOUR CONTRACT
Provided that you are an employee within two months of starting work you should be given a copy of the main terms of your contract regardless of how few hours a week you work. This should tell you who your employer is and the date when your employment started. It should also state your pay, hours, holidays, job title and place of work. You should also be given, in writing, a statement on whether your employment is temporary or permanent and whether any union negotiated collective agreements cover your work. Your legal right to this statement comes from section 1, Employment Rights Act 1996. If you have to work on a Sunday you should get a separate statement about this (see next section).

If your employer does not give you either of these statements, you should contact your GMB Representative .

If you are under the age of 18 you are considered as a “minor". What this means is that your employer cannot bind you to your contract terms where, taken as a whole, they are not beneficial to you. The reason for this is to protect you from accepting a contract, which is not in your overall interests.

You have the legal right to benefit from any of the terms in your contract and your employer's attempts to change or avoid them can be challenged. Your employer should not make changes to your contract without agreement. Some employers will allege that they can make changes provided that they give you notice, but this is not so and you should contact your GMB Representative, if changes which are not to your liking are imposed on you. Any changes to your existing terms and conditions should be set out in a new statement and should be given to you within a month of the change.

Although you hove a legal right to the written statement, even if you have not been given one, you still have a contract of employment if you have been hired by an employer to work in return for wages. Regardless of the hours that you work in a week or your age, once an employer has made an offer of work, and you have accepted it, then there is a contract. The terms under which you have agreed to work are the basis of the contract. Thus if your employer has said that you will work for seven hours on a Saturday and be paid £3.90 an hour, that becomes part of the legal contract.

In addition to the contract terms communicated to you in writing or orally (usually called express terms) there are other "implied terms". These are presumed to be in every employment contract even where they are not expressly stated. For example, your employer has an implied duty to take care of your safety at work. Another implied term is that of "mutual trust and confidence". This is presumed to exist in every contract because without trust and confidence there would be no guarantee for either party to the contract that the other would keep their side of the bargain.

YOUR PAY SLIP
Once you have begun working, regardless of the number of hours that you work in a week, your employer must give you, by your first pay date, an itemised pay statement which shows your gross pay, deductions and net pay. This right is given under section 8, Employment Rights Act 1996.

Your gross pay may be made up of a number of separate components like basic pay, shift pay, overtime and London allowance. These are sometimes shown separately on the pay slip. The deductions, which appear alongside these usually include tax and national insurance, if you are earning enough to pay these.

For tax purposes you can have annual earnings of up to £4,333 (approx £83 a week) (1999/2000) before you need to pay any tax. For National Insurance the lower earnings limit (LEL) is £66 a week (1999/2000). If you earn more than £66 a week then you would have to pay 2% on all earnings up to £66 and 10% on everything above that amount, until your earnings reach £5,833 when you then have to pay 23%. If you are under the age of 16 you do not pay National Insurance, although you may have to pay tax if your earnings have taken you above the tax threshold listed above. If you are receiving a student grant it is not taken into account in calculating your earnings.

You may also have a deduction made for an occupational pension scheme if your employer has one and provided it admits all employees. Many schemes, however, exclude temporary workers or those earning below the LEL of £66 a week.

NATIONAL INSURANCE NUMBERS
Once you have reached your 16th birthday you will be able to hold a National Insurance number. This will be with you throughout your working life. Normally you will be sent the number some time before your 16th birthday but if you have not received it you can apply to your local Social Security office, producing documentary evidence of your right to work in the UK, and you will be issued with it. If you are a student from a European Union state you can use your EU identity card to obtain a national insurance number. If you are an overseas student you should be allowed to work provided that this does not impact on your studies. You need, however, to get an authorisation form from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 makes all employers get proof of entitlement to work before taking anyone on. Many employers will use the Nl number as their way of checking on whether an individual has the right to work.

CASH IN HAND
According to a GMB/NUS survey nearly a third of students working in term time are paid cash in hand. This practice is very widespread and is nothing less than an employer-led fraud. If your employers propose that you should work cash-in-hand they are in effect giving you an illegal contract which means that you would be unable to enforce many of the legal rights outlined in this guide. You should contact your GMB representative, to let it know that your employer is proposing this.

You can also report your employer direct by contacting your local tax office. They have a team, which deals with employer fraud. You may also want to try and get evidence against your employer, for example, by taping conversations or by getting your employer to put in writing the fact that you are being paid cash in hand.

If you have evidence of serious malpractice in your workplace, for example fraud, and nothing has been done about it, you will have legal protection if you "blow the whistle" on your employer. This protection is contained within the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998.

PART-TIME WORK
Part time workers have to be treated in the same way as full time workers so far as all statutory rights are concerned e.g. dismissal, sick pay and redundancy. It is not the hours that you work which determine your rights.

However, what you earn can have an impact on some rights like sickness pay and maternity (see next section). If your employer is trying to exclude you from any rights just because you are part-time, contact your GMB representative .

TEMPORARY WORK
For most employment rights the important question is not your status - whether permanent or temporary - but how long you have been working and what you are earning. If a company directly employs you then you will have the status of an "employee" and be able to exercise your legal rights in exactly the same way as other employees.

If you are working through an agency, however, the situation is more complex. You will not be an employee of the company, although you may, in fact, be an employee of the agency itself, depending on the agency agreement. If you are unsure about your employment status contact your GMB representative .

Your contract
Your pay slip
National
      insurance
      numbers
Cash in hand
Part time work
Temporary work