Digital Signature Legality for Retail Trade in United Kingdom: Simplify Document Signing Process

How to eSign a document: digital signature legality for Retail Trade in United Kingdom

are you aware of your employee rights in the uk have you recently had a disagreement or a difficulty with your employer and you want to know where you stand or are you in a position where your job is at risk and you feel you're unsure of what rights you would have as an employee in the uk well that's a question i'm getting asked quite a lot at the moment so it makes sense to do a video on it so in this video what i'm going to do is go through the basic key employment rights that every employee in the uk should be aware of now if you haven't seen our channel before we do videos aimed to help employees that's employees either in employment or those seeking employment the purpose of the channel is to be very authentic very real and bluntly honest at times we don't want to hold back we want to give you an actual scope of what's really going on out there if you like this kind of stuff do consider subscribing to the channel and at the end of this video if you do like it give us a thumbs up so what are your basic employment rights in the uk well in this video i'm going to go through all of the key employment rights that you should be aware of the first one i want to go through is one that catches a lot of people out until you have worked for a company for two years then you're in a position where you don't have your full employment rights what a lot of people don't realize is that within the first two years you're not only not entitled to things like redundancy pay if you are let go the company can actually let you go for whatever reason they want at any point as long as it's not discriminatory or they fired you because you have information about them conducting some illegal activity for example then if they just don't like you if they just don't think you're a good fit they don't like you standing on the wrong bit of tile in the office they can fire you basically for whatever reason they want and to be honest with you there's not really much you can do about it a lot of people aren't really aware of that a lot of people also think that because you have a probationary period say three six months or even a year once you've completed that period and even if hr have signed off to say you've completed your probationary well that's it you're safe you have rights but that's not actually the case you see any point during the first two years regardless of whether you've completed your probation period or not if the company want to get rid of you for whatever reason they like they can have you ever heard the term lasting first out well that's pretty much what this comes down to the next employment right i want to go through is about lunch breaks now lunch breaks are actually a pretty common question that i get a lot of people will come to me and ask well how long am i allowed to have a lunch break for is my employer allowed to restrict me are they doing the right thing what are my rights now officially in the uk for every four hours you work you're meant to have the fifth hour as a lunch hour so if you work eight hours a day you can have a one hour lunch break smack bang in the middle because you'll do your first four hours have a lunch break do four more hours and then you're going home anyway so they're perfectly entitled to do that and a company is also allowed to break up that lunch hour into two or even four if they wanted separate quarters of that or halves of that so if they wanted to do a half hour here and a half hour there or even four 15 minute breaks they can do that as long as every four hours worked you are given an hour for break that's what they have to do under uk employment law now one question i also get with that is that will my employer put in the contract that i only have a 45 minute break that surely means because i've signed up for that then i have to have only a 45-minute break well that's not really gonna stand up in a court of law it doesn't matter what it says in your contract and if i'm being honest with you and i could do a whole separate video on this there are many things that are written into employment contracts that as soon as you walked into a court of law they would laugh you out of the court or laugh your employer out of the court one of them is lunch breaks under standard uk employment law you have a one-hour lunch break for every four hours worked yes as i say they can break up but a company cannot ride into your contract and then enforce it they only have a 45-minute break you are fully entitled to your one-hour lunch break the next employment right i want to go through is about holiday allowance you see with holiday allowance it can differ depending on how many days per week you do across the year on your actual employment contract now this could be slightly different if you're a contract or a temporary worker and to be honest with you that comes under a whole different degree so to cover myself the employment rights i'm going through here and in this whole video to be honest with you are actually going to be about permanent contracts now this could be either you on a full-time hour say doing 40 hours a week or even 25 hours but but with this i'm going to give you the relevant equivalent so listen carefully to this part because i don't really want to confuse you too much the way they calculate holiday entitlement in the uk is based on days works per week not hours work per week so if you work five days per week let's say monday to friday you're entitled to 20 days as a minimum statutory holiday allowance plus eight uk bank holidays now those uk bank holidays can differ depending if you're in scotland for example or wales or england they can change around but you are actually entitled in any of the uk countries to 20 days as a minimum if you work five days a week for a whole year and then you have the eight day bank holiday on top now the 20 days you can pick and choose when you want them and a company is also allowed to appropriate some of those hours to your christmas holiday allowance so they can save certainly if the company is closing down during christmas look we have to appropriate four days for example for your christmas allowance that's it and they'll put that into your contract if you sign to say you agree to that then it is seen as reasonable in a contract of law so they may give you the 20 days but they may proportion some of them for christmas for a shutdown period if their company might shut down in august for example and they are legally entitled to do that so even though you're given the 20 days holiday as a standard statutory it doesn't mean that all of those 20 days you can then pick and choose when you want to do it a company as well can also put in the contract for there'll be certain days of the year you cannot book holiday or there will be certain periods of the year certainly depending on the type of trade that the company does that you can or cannot book holiday on now they have to be fairly careful to still give quite a lot of flexibility but they are allowed for example if it's christmas and they're a retailer and it's december they can buy all right say look it's a company policy if you sign up on our contract with a company policy we don't allow anyone to book holiday during december and that will stand up because it's seen as reasonable it would be detrimental to their business you're signing a contract they're making you aware of it that seems okay and therefore it would be upheld in a court law again if you're a tourism company in your high seasons august and they say right you can't have anything during august because kids will be off school again they are well within their rights too so you cannot book holiday during that period but for the majority of the year if you have given those 20 days statutory then you can book them when you want the eight days bank holiday they are fixed there are obviously bank holidays on there but again some companies can say with bank holidays that you need to work those days it might be the sort of job where they need someone on call or their business is not closed down on a bank holiday they need people to work in which case if you do have to work on a bank holiday you're entitled to a new day off a loo day being a day that you can use as and when you want with appropriate notice now bear in mind with those five days as i say if you are on part-time hours then this will go down by four days per day so if you're working five days per week count each of those days as four days four days per week instead of you having 20 days off 20 days as a statutory allowance over a year as you would in five days you only have 16 days off hopefully that at least explains to you what your allowance is as a holiday allowance earlier in the video i said about the first two years of employment where you wouldn't have full employee rights but what about after two years of employment let's say a company wants to get rid of you then what do they do what are your rights at that point well there are two ways basically of getting rid of you from a company they're either finding a reason to dismiss you from the business and that could go through a format of an investigatory and then a disciplinary process and then finding new guilty of some form of misconduct or the other form of it is through a redundancy period now a redundancy period i don't go into too much detail about that because we did a whole video on how redundancy works and if you want to see that video click the link up there but with the disciplinary process i do want to touch on the disciplinary process a little bit now having been involved in many disciplinary processes myself and being involved in the actual process behind managing that for various different companies i've worked for i'm more than familiar with it and what you can and cannot get away with now typically there are three types of disciplinary process at any one company the terminologies might change but they'll always generally fall into well they have to fall into these three categories but the terminologies for them might slightly change but in probably 75 cases they have these three terminologies you've got the least severe which is misconduct then you've got serious misconduct and then gross misconduct now what happens is if a company finds you guilty of misconduct itself and they do fire you then this is the one when people say well i went to a tribunal and ended up getting my job back or got a payoff they generally got that because of misconduct you see misconduct can easily be construed as a genuine mistake human error lack of support lack of training all these different angles and my recommendation if you do ever get put into a disciplinary process unless you've got a employment law degree in which case you probably wouldn't be watching this video anyway then you probably want legal advice or some support certainly if you want to keep your job and you don't want to get yourself fired and you want to get away with something certainly if you feel you're in the right anyway when everyone's entitled to some form of defense why wouldn't you cover yourself if you're a member of a union then a union representative will come with you and they will be fully brief and fully aware of what you need to do or an employment lawyer can also help with this or if you have an independent colleague or someone like that who volunteers to sit with you on the process to give you advice some companies will allow for this but bear in mind many companies on their policy won't allow an internal employee to come in and sit help defend you because it will be seen as a conflict of interest in the business so you probably need to go externally from it but if you do have a case where you are fired for just misconduct those are the ones that can often be overturned because the severity of it is dubious they can't do anything more than that but if it ends up being serious misconduct or even gross misconduct these ones therefore they found evidence of your guilt that you have done something that you knew was wrong you either signed a document you've gone through training there is a legal amount of paperwork that demonstrates you are competent to know that what you have done is wrong and you have done it anyway and often this can be fraud some sort of theft you've committed a crime you've done something which brings the company into disrepute any of those things they come under serious or gross misconduct if i'm being honest with you if you are fired for serious or gross misconduct unless you've got some super lawyer to be able to get you out of it chances are your appeal is going to fall on deaf ears so bear those things in mind the next one i want to go through is something called restrictive covenants now you might be familiar with the term non-compete but basically restricted covenant is the same thing and again i could do a detailed video on that if you want to see a video on restricted covenants and non-complete clauses do let me know and i'll do it in more detail so for this section i'm just going to go through the brief parts of it now restricted covenant or a non-compete clause is something that's actually quite common in a lot of employment contracts without the employee actually knowing and the employment contract itself would say summer along the lines of if you were to leave the company you cannot go to a competitor and you cannot if you do go and work for a competitor then take clients or contact existing clients that you have privileged knowledge about or sensitive knowledge about during your employment here for a set period of time even after you have left the company so for example if you're doing a sales job or a management job and you have access to privileged client information and you go and work for a competitor even if it's two three months later many employment contracts that have a non-compete or restricted clause which should be covered in clause within it will say to you you cannot contact those clients and although there are dubious into what will actually stand up the key part here that will stand up in a court of law is if it can be proven by your old employer that you have used sensitive information and you have profited from the loss of your old employer by using that confidential information that you should not be using to your advantage then they can sue you for damages you can get a criminal record you can take the court but the other part even if the criminal damages themselves and the damage payments you pay aren't that much the other problem is you could even be fired from your current employer for it certainly if you've been there less than two years when these restrictive covenants gonna last typically with any restricted covenant they can't last any longer than really a year and if i'm being honest with you unless you are in a management position or above then the chances are you won't have enough clout for them to say that you could do the company serious damage because you wouldn't have that level of seniority within their business so restrictive covenants to be honest with you on many occasions aren't really worth the paper that they're printed on but for certain things certainly if you have been proven to take information and you have profited from it at your old employer's expense within the period that your restricted covenant says you shouldn't that's when they can take it to court and they can sue you for it and the thing is it's not even paying the damages that could be an issue or even getting fired from your new employer that can be the issue it's the court costs many employers will want to make an example of anyone that has taken a liberty when it comes to the restricted covenant what they'll do is go out and find an expensive lawyer who knows what they're doing even despite the fact that they know they've had to get you banged to rights and then you'll have to pick up that lawyer's fees if you lose the case so bear in mind if you are thinking about doing that that can be something that you probably want to avoid or you want to take legal advice to what you can or cannot do before you start doing that and even if you think on my employment contract doesn't contain a restrictive covenant trust me if you're in a management position or above i'd certainly be picking that up checking it out regardless one thing with restricted covenants though that i would point out that's pretty common that people don't realize would just be laughed out of a court of law is when they say you cannot work for a competitor in the industry you see they can't stop you legally working for a competitor as long as you are not going to that competitor and taking sensitive information with you to the competitor's advantage you're going to the competitor you're not directly in competition with your old employer not taking any sensitive information from them you're not using it to your advantage you're just going to work for a competitor that's perfectly right and you're protected by something called the 1998 competitions act competitions act in simple terms basically means you cannot do your trade without working within your industry so for example if you're a plumber a plumber's merchants then can't say to you right you can't go and work for another plumber's merchants because yeah you've got a restricted covenant on your contract how's that plumber then going to be able to pay their bills or have the income that they need to without using their trade so you'll be thrown out of court and that 1998 competitions act is there to protect you so again if an employer in your restricted covenant says you cannot work for competitors in the same industry yeah ignore that one that will not stand up in a court of law now do bear in mind i am not an employment lawyer i am not a certified expert and i don't pretend to be giving you information that i can guarantee fact for fact all of the information i'm giving you today stuff that i know but regardless i would always advise anybody to take legal advice from a qualified professional if they do have a dispute or an issue with their employer and they could find themselves in hot water if they get it wrong if you do have any questions on this or you want to know more details or you have any ideas for other videos then do put them in the comments below i do try to come back to every single person it's getting difficult at times depending on how well a video does but i will come back to you and i do tend to come back to you fairly quickly to be honest if you like this video do consider giving us a like do subscribe to the channel click the bell icon and select all and we'll see you for the next video