Recent Feedback
We require the legal amount of redundancy required for our employee who has worked for us on a part-time basis for 2 years with holiday pay etc. Her hours varied as and when we needed her with work volume from 14 to 20+ hours per week for 90% of the time. She did not have a contract. Is there a legal document we need to process this. How many weeks do we need to pay her? She was paid weekly by cheque. How much notice do we have to give her. Can we pay her out and just ask her to leave. We believe we had always said the hours of work would be as and when but our employee is not insisting we said she would have 20 hours every week. This has not been the case in all the time she has worked with us and up til now she has been Ok with the arrangement. She has insisted if we can not give her 20 hours she wants it in writing of reduced hours or we are to make her redundant.??
Already Tried: Avised her that we do not have the work to continue the hours that she would like? Due to down turn and this is the same as it has been since working with us and it has not been an issue in the past.
Hi Welcome to JustAnswer. My first response will follow shortly. Please feel free to follow up if anything is not clear
There is no legal requirement to pay someone redundancy at all. All you need to do is give reasonable notice that she is redundant. You need to have a discussion about this-from your description I think you have done so. You should have had a written contract, as it is illegal not have a written contract under the Employment Relations Act.
In this case you would either give her say 2 weeks notice, or if she wants to go now, then work out her average pay and give her 2 weeks of this.
We are very aware that we should have given her a contract and we have learnt a valuable lesson, however are we now legally bound to pay her redundancy she is requesting. We are prepared to give her 4 weeks of her average pay as redundancy to aliminate any further possible action from her, do you think this is appropriate or nessacary .
4 weeks would be a good deal for her I think. But there is no other requirement to pay any more.
Are we still Ok with having NO contract signed. As I said a lesson for us and we will ensure this will not happen again and seek proper advise. We are new business owners.
It is at the worst something you could be fined about, but someone would need to complain
Experience: LLB MMgt FAMINZ 32 years qualified as lawyer