When Nanny isn't required

[Amyrosanna]

Hey guys,

I'm totally new to "Mumsnet" so please bare we me.

I started working for a lovely family in October 2018.

Between Christmas and New Year the mum and dad were both at home therefore my services weren't required. I was asked if I would prefer to take this as my annual leave or to owe them the hours back. I said I would rather make up the hours. In the back of my mind however I wasn't 100% sure this was correct and I didn't want any awkwardness etc etc I suppose.

So my question is as I was available to work isn't it actually that if anything it is them that owe me the hours? I wouldn't ask for the hours back but the mum is planning a few things and using these owed hours

Really hope you can help, I'm never sure where to read up on things like this. Is there somewhere I can get this sort of info

Did they pay you for that period?

In the contract between our nanny and us, it was written that if she couldn’t come (her emergency etc) we wouldn’t pay her, but if we decided we didn’t need her on a day that she was supposed to be working, we would pay her because it was our decision to ask her not to come. This always worked well (and I’m not sure it ever happened!)

What might be more useful to you in this situation is that we also agreed she had 4 weeks holiday- 2 weeks chosen by her, and 2 weeks chosen by us. So they could have chosen to “make you” take annual leave on those days... I hope that helps. Perhaps you need a tighter contract?

I’m assuming you have a contract? And you have annual leave specified? I think it depends on the wording. A standard contract is 4 weeks where the employer chooses 2 weeks and the nanny chooses 2 weeks. In which case this would be your employers 2 weeks annual leave. We included a line about ‘discretionary leave’ basically leave that we specified, in addition to our 2 weeks of choice. But our nanny got paid. In the last 2 years of her employment our nanny got 10 weeks paid leave. I have to be honest and say that I became a little resentful because our nanny still put in for overtime (we are talking a few hours a month, not hundreds of hours), which I thought was a bit cheeky, given that she got 6 additional weeks of paid leave a year, but the reality is that she was perfectly entitled to do that. The other thing we did was average hours over the month, because it changed week to week. So it was 120 hours over 4 weeks. Some weeks might have been 20 hours, some were 40. Our nanny was happy with that. We have a new nanny now who is paid term time only. TBH your employer is being cheeky. If they want to give you 2 additional weeks off then it’s either their annual leave or they pay you, unless they have specified something different in the contract. If you have a 2nd nanny job (many nannies do) you can’t suddenlt have one employer asking you to double up your hours one week because they think you owe them time.

Christmas to New Year is typically taken as annual leave. You get at least 5.6 weeks annual leave per holiday year (check your contract) so if your holiday year ran 1st October - 31st September then you could have the time between Christmas and New Year as annual leave and be paid.

How could you make up the hours... are you very part-time? If you already did a 50+ hour working week doing additional hours on top will really restrict your social life.

Some contracts say how much choice each party gets. Legally an employer can dictate all the annual leave. In reality employees get to choose some of it, otherwise they tend to move job!

That's great guys thank you very much.....that has helped. I'm going to sit down with them and clarify the holiday thing and I agree that I need a tighter contract.

When you start a job , always address any holiday the employer takes extra to contract.
If you are available to work.you shpuld be paid. You shouldnt have to make it up at other times.

Their choice to give you time off. You should be paid and not make hours up /come out of their holiday - be extra holiday

It's fairly typical in a nanny contract for the employer to chose 50% of the nanny's holiday days and the nanny to chose the rest. This is what we have. So we could designate the time around Christmas to be part of our nanny's annual leave.