Deal cycle in employment contracts

How to create outlook signature

hi there welcome back to Monaco solicitors our um consultation today is with my client Stella who is um you know got her back to you because she you know she wants to maintain that kind of anonymity [Music] welcome Stella hello hi thanks for coming in would you like to give us a little summary of the scenario or like what is it that you that you need to Voice on so I need advice on what I can do with my current employer because I have had a self-employed teaching contract for four or five years and then it's been changed suddenly changed to employed contract and uh the terms of the self self-employed contract were not really self-employed it was not really legal I think um and other teachers have not signed this contract because it really didn't sound good but then the change was even worse in a way um because now we have this rolled up holiday pay that I think is also not from what it says on the Golf website that shouldn't be there um so I can definitely see something is wrong plus I wonder if um the fact that it's affecting my pay if that's also illegal because now I get paid less from the way that I'm taxed and then in the event of leaving I want to know just what the conditions are and what the notice period will be even and if I can keep some of the students that I've been teaching privately and so on lots of things okay all right and I think the issue about teaching some of your um students privately I think that's quite important to you right so well actually it's because I've been teaching for five years and I know they really want me to teach them um and it's true I mean you do invest time and effort in teaching people and you create a bond with them so the client should be the one that chooses um but of course there's also the contract that says something so I need to look at what's possible and what's not um so yeah um I just want to consider if some of them really want to study with me because I know some of them travel far to just study with me at the school and they'll be really disappointed if I left um yeah yeah so I just want to see what's possible okay so just in summary you started this uh teaching job about five years ago on a self-employed basis there's some things in the contract that really weren't genuinely self-employed really and uh and then most recently in September you signed a new contract which is a contract of employment so you switch to become an employee ing to that we had a really short notice we had one week some people just flatly left because I mean they just good they had just one day of teaching I could only was my full-time work so we had one week we couldn't even look over the contract we had to sign right away in order to get paid so it was yeah it was a change really really sudden we didn't even have time to say anything yeah kind of threat and no you're not going to get paid if you sign this any later then two days from now wow that's that's interesting so the company hasn't been behaving particularly nicely towards towards you guys anybody yeah so to recap in September you signed a contract of employment and that's what it looked like on on paper anyway so you went from self-employed to paye and in the contracts of employment there are clauses which we call restrictive covenants yeah yeah or post termination restrictions which uh stop you from taking your students with you when you leave because now you want to leave because of the way the company's been behaving you know even historically you weren't that happy you feel ready to leave but crucially can you take your students with you especially if they want to come with you and they should be allowed to so let's look at that now I've got the first contract that you signed there's one Clause here that says that um if yep the teacher may not provide tuition effectively to any of the students that they've met through the company apart from working through the company and then this this actually applies if the teacher leaves the company afterwards so that's the Clause that would have stopped you from taking them originally now the thing about that Clause is that it hasn't got any kind of time limit on it it almost seems that it's forever that you could never teach any of these students so that Clause is almost certainly too wide to be legally enforceable you know Clauses like this have to be quite narrow have to be defined you know in a period of months perhaps three maybe six you know maximum really in your job I mean you're not like a senior executive kind of role here with like top secret confidential information you're just a teacher all right so you know because because this purports to be forever a judge would look at that and say you know that's not impossible so you don't have to really worry about that old contract um what you might need to be more aware of is the new contract that you signed in September so yeah you know a few months ago so we're talking about I don't know six months ago or less yeah now in that one that looks like you are an employee ing to that one so they've been paying you paye okay and taxes do being taxed at source you say you've been getting less money I think yeah overall yeah yeah yeah which I also think it's weird right I'm doing the same job getting less money is that normal for them to change contract well it's it's not very appealing I think a lot of people would do what you're doing which is to get some advice and think about leaving yeah it's not um it's legal as it were to pay people less money but of course it can be constructive dismissal if they've been employed for two years so you could You could argue here that you have been employed for five years and actually that what they're doing is constructive dismissal because you could argue that the previous self-employed contract because it was so strict on you you could hardly take a day off you know they weren't agreeing days off it was specific set times and places you know they controlled everything and it was for many years yeah that looks like an employment situation but then they were just trying to avoid paying you paying the tax so you could argue that you were employed then and then what happened in September was constructive dismissal so you could leave and sue them for financial loss in between jobs the fact that we're now four months later nearly five is is a problem potentially because they could say that you've left it too late so if an employer behaves badly and you resign that's fine but normally what you've got to do is you've got to um you've got to work on the protest if you're going to stay there you've got to flag it up preferably in writing say you're working under protest perhaps submit a formal written grievance you know then go through the grievance appeal procedure and then when you've exhausted all the internal procedures then you need to resign pretty quickly or if you don't go through the agreements for it you just need to resign quite quickly in response to the the the so-called breach of trust and confidence so the longer you stay there the easier it could be for the company to say yeah potentially we did something that was in breach of trust and confidence but you accepted that reach by staying so there's a slight I need to pay rent well this is the Dilemma yeah this is the thing so you know you could say I mean why wait till now anyway is there a specific reason to wait actually to to have full-time teaching that you can live off of it's not that easy so um yeah I mean I have been looking for other schools to work for but in the scene in the same time I've been kind of juggling other things so yeah I've been actually taking more private students in my days off so I started working two more days a week which gave me less time to apply for other jobs yeah yeah it's like uh yeah yeah fair enough okay well let's look at the claws in here anyway that talks about what you can and can't do with students so in here it says you will not so effectively for six months after the last day of employment and within five miles of any of their sites do any business with any person who's six months who in the last six months from from your last day going back in time from that in that time that was a client of the company and that you you you taught interestingly it by the look of this you could if you taught them more than five miles away from the closest office then you it would seem that they're okay with that because they they only restrict anything happening within a five mile radius would that work for you could you teach students outside of five miles well some of them I would go to their house yes so some of them do live that far perfect but some of them don't some of them may live really close Okay so the ones that do live that far you could go to the house some of the living five miles away or more from the office it's quite unusual of them to have this in there you see most Clauses that you see don't have a geographical restriction on that so it could be a client anywhere most of these types of glosses would say any client yeah it could be anywhere around the world almost right you know I mean I know teaching is not Global profession but for some reason they've decided to put within five miles let me just double check that and is it just for six months so then if I wait six months they can still have me as a teacher yeah you really wants me oh yeah yeah six months after your last day they can you can do whatever you want you know in terms of taking it so then that's easy because the ones that are really desperate for me they can call me I have to stick some hands for sure absolutely I can tell them after this day you can contact me absolutely uh right interesting so I've looked into I've looked into a couple of options for you because I know we discussed before the possibility that you could just leave deal with the students anyway and then kind of hope they don't notice and with any luck you know no one will notice and it's fine um that's that is definitely a possibility you know on the basis that the contract itself your argue it would be that the contract itself is unlawful so they've effectively torn up the contract by their bad behavior and put it in the bin so there is no contract they're the ones who ripped it up and by leaving you're accepting that they've done that so there's nothing in here stopping it and the problem with that is that suddenly if you leave and suddenly the students that you were teaching will leave it might look a bit more than a coincidence and there seems to have gone to a fair bit of effort with this Clause with this uh contracts so they could try to make their life difficult it's worth saying that they could take you to court and take out an injunction in the high court I mean it's unlikely for a teacher especially I mean if you're like I say a CEO of a big company then yeah that's what happens all the time in in corporate world but um to be honest in the teaching world is very unusual but it's possible and you should be aware and if that did happen you know a judge would look at that and say well you sign the documentation and you didn't say anything to them before you left you weren't open about it so they might hold that against you and say well you should have known and what you're trying to get away with something here so there's another option where you can say to them look I'm leaving and I'm gonna take these clients you tell them the names of the students and you're gonna let me take them and if you don't let me take them then I'm gonna sue you for five years of holiday pay which she should have paid me when I was working for you self-employed but of course you weren't self-employed you know you say I wasn't self-employed because you had all the control over me you had you you I couldn't take a day off and very difficult you know I had to work specific hours days all the kind of control tests that make it much more like an employed contract so at that point you could do a deal with them in writing you know whereas you know in the open as it was still be confidential between between you and them yeah I just think it's because they're just impossible to deal with yeah even to the point of ridiculous where nobody's got anything to win it's just like saying no just for the sake of saying no like just don't make them happy and I don't you know they'll say yes you know to the teacher whatever the teacher asked to say no you know it's almost like they run under this policy so yeah it's very bizarre to imagine even that they will agree to a deal yeah yeah also knowing of their behavior and after yeah they I know they lost a case or two before and how they behaved after that as well and yeah yeah so I'm just not looking forward to this yeah maybe I should be more bold and present the situation I think maybe that's the right thing to do right um but I I don't yeah I don't know how I would go about doing that yeah the the thought of the conflict is a bit too much yeah at this point I think it's hard when you don't have a lawyer especially if they've got a lawyer yeah then you know you could be receiving letters that you don't know what to do with um it's easy if you if you've got your own lawyer you know you can put the they they understand the pressure the stress they've done it before it's their day job and if you're on your own I get that most people don't want that fight with interesting um that you you could have a claim for five years of holiday pay and do you think I'm in yeah I don't know if it's worth worth the conflict uh and uh the money as well because if you go to court then there's that expense and of course I could have maybe with the Union I could have some free legal support um yeah but then I don't know I don't know what's the best way to just get out of this sure sure I mean okay you know what I was saying there is well I think I I hear that I hear your your common sense points that you're you're concerned and of course you should be it's common sense you know the thought of going to court or getting a lawyer it's expensive it sounds like a lot of um difficulty but uh what I was trying to say was if you could have a claim for five years holiday pay so let's say it's around a month a month of holiday per year on the average employee I don't know if you're five days a week or only three or something so it would be four four so be Pro routers so it might be 20 days a year so for five five times twenty days is 100 days so a third of a Year's income which would be I'm sure many thousands of pounds I mean you you could have that claim anyway doesn't matter what you decide to do whether you want to leave quietly or not or you know do it all openly or take the students with you or not you can still have that claim I I'm not you know I don't know so let's say you're getting 30 000 a year so that claim will be ten thousand a year right well if you're getting paid twenty thousand a year that's a seven thousand Pounds claim there right there so a union would look at that and potentially um you could get a lawyer to look at that on a no win no fee basis ideally for you yeah it's it's difficult to get that to find lawyers to do do that and not many firms Specialists enough to know how to do that they just see a lot of risks for themselves yeah we do do that and you know we'd have to look carefully at all the you know even this is just a quick look right a quick consultation we have to look deeply into the paperwork and you know it's it's quite a it's before taking on something on that basis we'd have to be really sure we could get that kind of result and the fact is you by the sounds of it you probably don't even want to go down that route anyway it's just I know it's a it's well it's a bit stressful isn't it I mean it's true it wasn't illegal I'm not even the only one in this situation I'm thinking about all my colleagues that have been under the same you know all calling sick if they wanted to have a day off uh and yeah it's uh it's not just me thinking everybody should do that all together how many of you uh I don't know 20 20. yeah so you get 20 and everyone's got a claim for 10 000 pounds you have lawyers queuing up to look at your guys you know suddenly well they think that's that's a valuable case you know because they would then take a percentage of that you know which which would be quite a lot for them so you know suddenly but obviously organizing 20 people to make a claim is I'm not saying it's a full-time job but it's it's not what you had in mind I think yeah before you before you go a lot of people who are unhappy just left yeah or didn't sign or yeah well that's that's what happens normally because employers have they're holding all the cards they've got your your paycheck at the end of the month they could not pay you that they can make your life difficult not give you work you know they've probably got lawyers because they've got more money so a lot of employees are bullied into things that you know are wrong frankly and um by and large employee employers get away with it yeah and they have even have heard that they would not Book Students for the people that they wanted to just get rid of so they wouldn't also dismiss people in these very unlawful ways yeah which is instead of saying that let's sit down this is I need to talk to you about this you know you're doing these things wrong and being open and honest and like a responsible employer should behave just make their lives difficult manage them out I hope they leave yeah all sorts yeah very common okay well you've got a few options there to be thinking about so I don't know if you have any specific questions at this point uh I don't have a question on the notice because well I guess it's similar so I have in the self-employed contract uh I think it says over there is like uh term one month or something like that right or I don't know how many weeks and and then the new contract says that um well in my case because I've been there for about five years I would need to give about five weeks but I wonder if this contracts accumulate or because I signed a new one as employed I can consider that I just need to give less than like one week notice now that I've signed a new contract because it's employed it's is it like the same kind of company does it does it include my previous contract or not this um so looking at this this is your new contract that's the termination Clause there yeah so it seems to say after your probation period is finished one month yeah so right but was I was I on under probationary period I mean because I've been working for them under this other contract so that's what I'm not understanding but you saw in this new contract right so legally it is a bit of a gray area when contracts are you know in in themselves the contracts are unlawful but the fact is that on the face of it without going too deeply into the scenario you did sign this new contract so it probably does apply so therefore and you have been working under it for a number of months now so if it on the basis side does apply ing to this on completion of your probationary period it's one month service at one month's notice and then does it say that you've completed your probationary period doesn't say anything about probationary period no because at the same time I've been there for five years so I wonder if they expect me to to give a five-week notice one for each year that I've been working like it says you know yep but you haven't been told that you've caused your probationary period right well no because I was not on it I think well you could just give one week then under this okay and you know the fact is when employees give short notice to employers it's actually very difficult for employers to do anything about it anyway because they'd have to show that they lost financially by not having you there and that they couldn't get a replacement but actually you know they're not paying you for the time that you weren't there so they've not lost financially by paying by paying you more than you worked so that they'd have to show they look physically couldn't arrange cover for your students and I imagine they probably could arrange cover so they'd struggle to show that you're gonna you're gonna cause some loss so I'm I'm gonna go with one weekend you see it's just good to know because what they're doing is we're also not supposed to you know tell the students that we're leaving and even if I wasn't planning to tell the students at all after teaching them for five years I don't want to tell them that I'm leaving because they'll be really upset of course what does it just say that um that's that's actually yeah that's what they're saying I don't know where they say that we cannot yeah you know give our you know contact and all of that and so yeah we're not even supposed to say that we're leaving so and you know this is it's interesting now with social media and Linkedin and Facebook and yeah Instagram you know people can find people yeah and whether they give the contents or not yeah but it would just be plain ruins yeah absolutely and so yeah so if I had less notice um to give them then yeah maybe I just need to think what to do really all right we'll have a think about it let me know what you want to do and uh yeah best of luck if it's Pizza thank you cheers well thanks very much for tuning in to another Monaco solicitors consultation and stay tuned And subscribe to this channel to be updated for our next one give us a like for this video and if you've got any questions about maybe this case relates to a similar case uh to your case just put them in the comments below this video on the YouTube channel or get in touch with us via our website link also in the description below thanks very much thank you