Role change: Advice on Clarifying Pay

[MaisOuiMaisOui]

Hi

Can anyone help me understand exactly what I am entitled to consider my pay to legitimately be after a couple of role changes where retrospectively I think things were not clarified in writing properly. I received variation letters to confirm role changes, but pay wasn’t specified in the last variation I received.

Reorganisation is looming, HR are being unresponsive and I’d like to be fairly sure what my legal position on pay might be should redundancy come up.


Quick history:

Started working for current company in feb 2015.
Changed to 0.94wte in Aug 2015

Changed role in Jul 2017, pay increase and moved back to full time

Took on temporary responsibilities, temp pay increase aug 2017. Received variation letter confirming new salary.

Changed role in jan 2019 before temp pay increase finished as I was still performing the additional duties. I was told there would be “no change to your current pay and benefits” at the time of taking on the new role and have continued to be paid as if the temp increase was now permanent. I understood this to be basically giving me a pay rise to take the new role. But this was a verbal understanding.

Looking back though, I have worked out that my employer is still paying me as if I am 0.94wte, despite me being full time since July 2017! Obviously I want this fixed and have been asking HR to sort it for the last 6 months.

The company is struggling with the current economic climate and looking for ways to cut costs. My concern is that if I push this and they look back through the records, they might try and argue that the temp pay increase I was given in aug 2017 should have ended when I changed role in Jan 2019 and should not carry through to my new role, so the “temporary” increase would now be deducted from my current salary then the missing 0.06wte accounted for. So i might actually be worse off. Or even owe my employer money.

Put simply, am I entitled to rely on “no change to your current pay/benefits” meaning that my salary (pay + temp uplift) on my last day in role X would transfer to be my permanent pay package under role Y. So they can’t now take the “temporary” amount away as they effectively made it permanent when I changed role with no change to “current” package.

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for reading such a long and rambling explanation.

[flowery]

"am I entitled to rely on “no change to your current pay/benefits” meaning that my salary (pay + temp uplift) on my last day in role X would transfer to be my permanent pay package under role Y"

Hmm. Probably. You have a good argument.

I would be more concerned about it taking 6 months. What have HR been saying for 6 months about paying you at less than full time rate? Are they denying it? Are they actually claiming it was for a different reason - your post seems to suggest you think they might do this, but what have they actually said so far?

Are you sure that your increase in July 2017 wasn't right? You say you've now worked out it was wrong, but for it to have been wrong for all that time without you noticing is a bit odd - was the salary not confirmed to you at the time?

[MaisOuiMaisOui]

Thanks Flowery

The reason I didn’t notice it in July 2017 is that my increase in salary wasn’t paid until Oct 2017 and was combined with my temporary pay rise and backdated. So the amount paid wasn’t really easy to disentangle. It looked about right, I didn’t dig any deeper. I trusted it would be right and just moved on. It doesn’t represent a massive amount of money so not really hugely noticeable.

It’s only when we had a new hr system implemented last year that I could see from my “employee info” that I was down as 0.94 still. And that’s when I raised it. And went back and really looked at payslips and worked it all out.

HR responded by saying they would look into it. Every time I chase, they are still looking into it. I think the problem is that the company went through a merger and old HR records weren’t passed on comprehensively so they really don’t know. There are lots of things that changed in people’s contracts prior to the merger that they have been asked to prove were changed to the HR team in the new company.

HR are now located outside of the UK so I can’t even camp out in their office until they give me an answer.

I’d just like it sorted out so I know where I am.