Part time pay - discriminatory

[Snowy1]

Hi
Maybe someone can tell me if I am missing something.....I'm back at work after maternity leave and have reduced my hours slightly, from 36 hrs (full time) to 32.5 hrs per week. This means I am working just half a day less each week.

I thought I would loose 10% of my pay as I am working 10% fewer hours. After getting my payslip and a phone call to HR I have been told that full time workers actually get paid for 41 hrs a week even though they only have to work 36 hrs. The 5 extra hrs are paid 'meal breaks'. As soon as you reduce your hours by ANY amount you only get paid for the hours you actually work ie not the extra 5 hours 'mealbreaks'.

So, I've reduced my working hours by 3.5hrs a week but am loosing 8.5hrs! This seems totally unreasonable and discrimatory to me. Before I take it further I wanted to test it out here to see if I'm missing something???

If its the same job and part timers don't get paid meal breaks but full timers do then its discriminatory.

Agreed. If they are planning on taking away the meal hour for just the one half day that you are not there then that would be ok - you would of course leave at 12.30 not 1.30 in such a situation, but removing your entitlement on the other days is absolutely discrimination and you need to point it out to them. TBH I would query the whole 'meal hours' thing as it sounds quote odd (unless you are in a care setting and potentially 'on call') - is it mentioned in your employment contract.

I work in an organisation that does this. Civil Service perhaps?

Full time staff do get paid for 41 hours and this includes a paid meal break.

Part time staff's whole time equivalent is calucalted over 36 hours. In reality, this means that they get a slightly higher rate of pay. So in your case, your whole time equivalent is 0.9, so it means that your terms and conditions are 0.9 of a full timer.

Are you still getting meal breaks but no longer getting paid for them?

Are people expected to be available during meal breaks?

So to give you an example, colleague was full time and her hourly rate was £11 ish an hour. Since returning from maternity leave part time, her hourly rate is now £12.50 ish. So, she doesn't get paid for her lunch break technically, but she gets it back in a higher salary.

I think its strange, but thats the way my company does it.

Obviously, you should confirm this, but I'll think you'll find it should work out (hopefully).

I have worked in three organisations (so far!) where this is the norm ie when working full time you actually work less hours than your contracted hours. So work 35 hours per week but contracted for 36.5, 37 & 40 hours.

This has come as a shock to quite a few colleagues who went part time as they lost more hours than they thought they would.

Were you on some kind of historic contract that was broken when you changed hours.

We have protected annual leave if we worked before xxx date. If you change role or reduce hours a new contract comes into force and you lose it. Is this similar?

It's really useful to hear how it works in other places, so thanks.

It isn't the Civil Service, but it is a public sector organisation and I think the terms and conditions were inherited from the Civil Service.

I could understand if I was getting a higher hourly rate to make up for it, and because it is all just shown as annual / monthly salary I haven't worked that out properly, but from what I can tell that's not the case. I seem to have just lost pay for 8.5hr a wk when I've only dropped 3.5hr work.

I have emailed HR today to ask for the rationale behind this policy. I just think it is a totally unfair penalty for reducing hours by just a little bit! It also impacts disportionately on women so I really think it is discrimination.

Has anyone had any experience of challenging this?

It does sound odd. I've never heard of the public sector getting paid meal breaks before, everywhere I've worked in the NHS, meal breaks are always unpaid.

I used to work for a sort of public sector business that did this. Then someone realised it was unfair on the part-timers so they reduced all the full-time staff's hours by 5 to make the meal breaks unpaid, whilst not adjusting total pay. This process increased the hourly rate a fair bit.

For us part-timers, who'd never had breaks, it created a significant pay increase. It was backdated to include pro-rata holiday taken in the previous year, and we'd all been more or less full time in that period.

The full/part time divide grew bigger, as the full timers gained nothing.

The back pay funded my holiday to USA

Don't know if it's true but we heard that the guy who formulated the adjustment was fired.