As an HR manager, it’s your job to make sure that your employees are being treated fairly. There are a lot of laws about what employees are entitled to and you need to make sure that your company is not in breach of them.

There are a lot of common ones like minimum wage, working hours and health and safety. But there are a lot of employee rights that you may not be aware of and you might be in breach of the law without even realizing it. To avoid that happening, make sure that you’re aware of these lesser known employee rights.

Minimum Wage

Everybody knows that there is a minimum wage that you have to offer all of your employees, but there are some laws surrounding the minimum wage that you might not be aware of. Not only do you have to pay the minimum wage, but you also have to pay at least 3 hours per shift, regardless of how long somebody has worked.

So, if there is some kind of problem with the building like a leak or an electrical fault and you have to close the business down for the day and send people home early, you still legally have to pay them 3 hours wages, even if they didn’t work for that long.

Voting

When an election rolls around, everybody needs to get out and vote. But a lot of employers don’t realize that they’re legally obliged to give people time off so they can go and vote in a lot of places.

You don’t have to give people the entire day off because most polling stations use a Smartmatic E-Voting so the process is quite quick these days.

You’ll just have to work out what a reasonable amount of time is when you factor in travel to the nearest polling station. In most cases, letting people come in a few hours late is fine but it’s illegal to stop them from leaving work to vote entirely.

Cash Shortages

If you work at a cash register and the till is down at the end of the day, a lot of employers will take the missing cash out of your wages. However, this isn’t usually legal. If you were the only one that had access to that particular cash register all day and nobody else could possibly get into it, then your employer can reclaim the money from you. In all other cases, where somebody else could use the register, it is against the law for them to dock your wages.

Unsafe Work

If an employee is given a task and they don’t believe it to be safe because the employer hasn’t followed proper health and safety procedure, they’re well within their rights to refuse that task without any consequence. As long as there is sufficient evidence that it is unsafe, the employer is not allowed to reprimand them in any way for refusing the task.

Even though you might not mean to, you could be breaking the law if you’re unaware of these employee rights and you’re not following the rules properly.

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