Not enough holidays from stingy employer

As of Oct 2010 all full time UK workers were entitled to 5.6 weeks leave, 28 days leave, including bank holidays although (a) your employer does not have to pay you for bank holidays as it's not a legal requirement but do out of good practice (b) part time workers get a portion of the 5.6 weeks leave, so if you work 4 days you'll get 22 days, to work that out times 4 days by 5.6 which = 22 days and so on. Employers may decide to round up the annual leave figure but they CAN'T round it down.

Employers have the right to tell you when to take your annual leave, whether annual close down, Xmas etc. but they have to give you advance notice, 3-6 months. Remember your annual leave entitlement begins the first day you start work & not after a probationary period.

Under the Working Time Directive if you fall sick during your leave you're able to claim that portion of your leave again even if it means allowing the days off to be carried over to the following year so workers will be able to accrue & take statutory annual leave during sick leave. You'll obviously need clear evidence of your illness & you can get this via a Fit Note from your GP but beware this can be complex.

It's up to employees to use their leave for the year otherwise you may lose it if your company has no system for carrying over annual leave to the following year. Read your employment contract because this has all the important elements on what your employer can/can't do, read about your sick leave as some employers only offer SSP others offer enhanced sick leave payments.

If anyone needs help with their employment contracts email me at andre@hradvisorltd.com, I can go over it with you. I normally charge a flat £10 fee for most cases but if it's complex we can discuss the matter/fee. This invite is also open to employers who want to get things right for their employees, so send me a dummy employment contract & I'll check it for you. Thanks.

Employers can be inhumane and family matters do not count, only their family and their own health and wellbeing matters.

It also disgusted me when my dad fell ill with kidney stones 2 days before he had booked a week off work, he reported his absence which he wasn't paid for and then the cheeky t**** didnt pay him for his weeks holiday he had booked months before. How is this fair? If you are poorly before a holiday is hardly anyones fault is it?

Where I used to work we had to save 7days holiday for Xmas even though the damn place is closed over that time anyway. 7 days is a huge chunk out of just 20 day allowance leaving 13 days left for the year (bank holidays on top of course) I'd find myself working overtime to accrue more holidays. It's wrong how employees should use their own holidays when the company closes anyway, it's an excuse for them not to owe you more holidays isn't it?

Hey can I take my holiday as I have 4 weeks to use and want 5 days off.....NO...3 months later...can I take a holiday now...NO you didnt use it so you lost it....can I have my holiday pay then..NO did you even listen to a word I said? DID YOU??? youre useless infact no youre fired get to f out of my building..

People who call this gripe "anarchic" and "communist" are truly the plague that allows employers and indeed the government to get away with this kind of insult. A job is not the most important thing in life, and anyone who bleats that tried and tested defence of the intellectually inferior ("It's how the real world works", "Boohoo lazy people!" and such) really doesn't have the capacity to understand that it is their own unquestioning conformity and inability to question "authority" that leads to such shoddy treatment.

Anyone who actively WANTS to spend the majority of their day wasting hours of their life is the one to decry, in my book.

The way things are at the moment I think everyone who still has a job should be grateful and not keep carping about how much holiday they get!

Small companies find it hard enough anyway to manage without an employee when they are away and still pay them.

My employer managed to get round that one too - we got the minimum 24 days, but we're forced to take 3 days of our holiday entitlement during the Christmas period - when the office is shut anyway! I was chuffed to learn that the minimum hols have went up to 28 days, but somehow my boss has found a way round this and we've not actually got any more days, but instead the public hols (e.g Easter Monday, Mayday, etc) that we got off historically are now part of our holiday leave in the same way as those Xmas hols and not additional. This is perfectly legal, as employers are not obliged to give you bank hols, etc off. What a joke?!

My ex boss worked the holiday game.
New staff 12 days paid holiday and 8 public holidays made the 20 days minimum per year.
Managerial Technical staff 25 days minimum plus 8 public holidays. He tried the opt out working time directive, till it was pointed out it had to be a seperate document and not in the Contract.
Needless to say he has immigrant labour falling over themselves to work for him.

I agree whole heartedly with this gripe. I'd like to add that I'm annoyed how some companies allocate holiday differently to different people. You'd rightly expect, say, managers to get more holiday entitlement than ground-level employees. But when you have been at a company 5 years and are getting less holiday than someone who started 5 months ago, thats just wrong. I think all companies should reward loyal employees with +1 extra day holiday for each year they've been there, as a bare minimum. It improves moral, and stops people taking "sick" days. So it's in the companys' interests to give more holiday. At least with holiday it can be planned, booked, etc. unlike "sick" days which can happen quite randomly.

Jobs for the boys; this is wonderful for you, but have you thought about where your wages come from?

Oh yes you have!! You told the rest of us to keep paying the taxes. Lovely. Problem is; if everyone was a civil servant.........?

Join the civil service gravy train!! I did, and just in time too. Not only is my job secure during this recession, but I get 30 days paid leave IN ADDITION to more than ten public and privilege holidays. I finish work at 3.30pm daily too. I'd never go back to working for a company, let alone a small business again. As for being self-employed.. did that for 10 years and never again; no paid holidays there. Now I take a couple of extra days holiday to prepare for and unwind from my foreign holidays.

I write this on the first day of my second holiday this month. Keep paying the taxes =D

MikeP, you sound like the illegitimate lovechild of Thatcher/Tebbit. I guess you run a small business and expect your employees to work 75 hours a week with no annual leave entitlement and call you Sir and tell them that if they don't like it you can find some "fuzzy wuzzies " to do their job for sixpence a month. No wonder we are in the mire with attitudes like yours.
Small businessman, just because all employees have a right to 28 days leave doesn't mean they'll get it, just the same as the minimum wage rule doesn't always apply.

Andy

Have I read that correctly? Only five days a year paid holiday? I assume the 5 days is in addition to any statutory paid holidays but even so that is absolutely dreadful.

As part of the EU British firms are slowly but surely being forced to give a civilised amount of leave but it has taken a very long time for the UK to even begin to catch up with the rest of Europe. I'm sure if they could get away with it some British firms would love to only give 5 days paid holiday.

smallbusiness man : You are 100% correct but most of the comments and the original gripe are from people vwho are just too bone idle to work and too ignorant to understand basic business economics.

They want service 24/7, and they want 35 days or more holiday, and more money but they don't think that this is paradoxical and has implications. Then when employers bring in other people who are prepared to work harder and longer and be grateful for the opportunity they complain that their jobs are being taken away by 'immigrants'.

I'm sick of hearing about the 'exploited workers' and the 'oppressed masses' and all this Trotskyite nonsense. These people need to catch a wake-up, smell the coffee, and realise that communism is, thankfully, dead, and we're in a free market.

I am surprised at the inaccuracy of this 'gripe' and it's anarchic tone. The CIPD annual survey indicates that approx 90% of employers in all sectors give 25 days+ holiday and from 1st April all employees will have a statutory right to 28 days in any case. Has the contributor not noticed that there is a world-wide recession and that employers need to maximise the contribution of their staff just to survive? Providing lengthy holiday is hardly conducive to business survival!

It should also be remembered that the majority of employees in the UK work for small businesses who can ill-afford the luxury of staff being away for long periods of time. It's all right for large corporates or the public sector (whose holidays are paid for from the public purse anyway) to give generous holidays but when it comes to the small business it just doesn't make sense. In any case, a lot of my small business clents tell me that their staff don't take all their leave entitlement in any case as they don't know what to do with the time off!

Try having work every Christmas Eve and the Day after Christmas. Try working everyday before Thanksgiving because these days are "excluded" from days to use your holiday time on.... then lets see how much you wine about your cushy job and flexibilty with time - - at least you are given the option of using your time over the actual Holidays!!

As a small business owner of a delivery company when staff have holidays we have to buy in cover from outside of the company. So how can paying for the the member of staff their statutory entitlement only and paying for someone else to do the work be stingy. Baring in mind that if we do not complete the deliveries contract or collect freight from our customers we would lose our business as the contract would be breached and our customers would not use use us anymore. To be able increase holidays if when you want to buy proucts from the shops or the internet you would have to pay at least a 50% increase in delivery charges (whether its built into the price as free delivery or not). Then you would not be able to go on those extra holidays that you want. You can't have something for nothing.

Just thought I would let you know about the new holiday entitlement that my company has implemented into our workplace. As you are probably aware, the entitlement has been increased from 20 to 24 days from the beginning of your working year so in this case mine is from January 1. Last year, I had 20 days and the company would give us 3 days at Christmas which are the bank holidays.

Sounds good doesn't it? Well, I now have the extra days but guess what? The company has taken the 3 days back off me for Christmas so I now have to use these as holiday out of my entitlement!! Therefore, I gain 1 day, thanks a lot, LLOYD FRASER, and yes folks, it's legal as your company does not have to pay you for bank holidays!!

I wonder how many more tight fisted companies with such a caring attitude like LLOYD FRASER there are. Quite a few I am guessing.

I thought Christmas was a PAID holiday? It has been all the years I have worked and I'm 55 yrs old. NOT THIS YEAR. We now have to work extra hours leading up to Christmas day so we dont loose 8hrs pay due to close down. WHAT??

Since when did this come in? Has any one else been hit with this ?