DD1's employers mucking her hours around

[mumrian]

DD1 is 17 years old & at full time 6th form college. She has a weekend job totalling 10 hours over the weekend, 7 hours one day & 3 hours the other day. There is no consistency in the days which she does these hours & she often has to ask midweek what her hours are for the following weekend. This weekend she asked to work the short hours on Saturday & the all day today, on Tuesday after chasing up the rota. The joint owner of the company did not get back to her straight away & then reluctantly agreed to this after asking her why & when told that dd1 had an appointment. In changing she said that she had had to alter all the weekend's staff rotas around to accommodate this & that dd1 would have to take only half an hour for lunch today.
After completing her weekend's hours dd1 has come home tonight & said that noone else had altered their hours & the posted rota is still the original one, from before her hours altering. The owner is now saying that any other alteration requests to her hours will have to be taken out of her holiday entitlement, we feel that this is very unfair & want to know whether it is permissable or not as surely as long as dd1 gives suffcient notice of a request for certain hours over the weekend they should be able to fit them in in view of the flexibility that has been displayed in their scheduling of hours and late notice of times.DD1 would still be working the full 10 hours that she works each weekend.

What does her contract say about how her hours work?

Her original contract was for two days of 7.5 hours, which she did over the summer holidays but before starting 6th form she asked to drop to the the 10 hours total, however she has not been given a new contract for the reduced hours. she orignally asked for 2 days of 5 hours each but was offered the current combination & has never been told that the hours would be fixed. (she works for a leisure/family entertainment company as a customer assistant)

BTW i'm a regular m'netter but have namechanged for this.

It sounds to me that your DD is being used here as the person that has to provide all the flexibility for the rest of the team.

My feeling is that she shold go and see the boss and ask for a new contract with fixed hours. Then if she wants occassional time off she can use her holidays.

If the boss disagrees start looking for another job.

The trouble is just because it's possible for her boss to change her hours at her request, there's absolutely no obligation for him/her to do so.

Sounds as though the boss is being a bit churlish but there's nothing illegal in refusing to alter a rota, even though it would be easy to do it.

Get another job? They sound like shits.

I personally am sick to death of employers treating people how they want. I personally would vote with my feet and find a new nicer employer.