Businesses tend to get away with a lot when it comes to their employees.
With people working for them who will find it hard to stick up for themselves, don’t know what their rights are, or simply don’t mind being taken advantage of – this is only made easier for them. Of course, when you’re doing a job for someone, it’s only fair that you are treated within the law, as long as you’re doing them the same courtesy.
To help you out with this, this post will be showing you how to identify and squash a problem like this before it starts to impact you, giving you the power to control your contract, and be treated exactly how you should be.
Identifying the Issue
This process is going to start with a little bit of research, and you will have to do this for yourself. You will probably already have a good idea on where you are being fooled, giving you an easy place to start from, with a quick search or two is the best way to find out whether or not you should be making a formal complaint.
Services like Google make this nice and easy, often giving you snippets from the most popular sites in your services. To make this even easier, you will have to use the right search terms and might have to go through more than one search before you find exactly what you want.
There are loads of organisations out there which can help you with this sort of work. Most people have access to charities which are in place to protect working people, and a group like this will often be happy to answer your employment-related questions for free.
For example, if you’re being forced to work too many hours and your job feels unsafe as a result, you can ask someone from your local charity how much you should be working before getting breaks or finishing for the day. Most places have strict rules in place to stop workers from hurting themselves in this sort of environment.
Finding a Solution
There are several routes you can go down when you’re trying to find a solution to this, but only you will be able to decide which is the best in your situation. Below, you can find some examples of the solutions you can try, but it’s worth being careful; you may not be able to go back once you’ve decided to go down one of these routes. It’s always best to be, and try and be compassionate at this stage:
- Talk To Your Boss: In a lot of cases, especially with smaller companies, your boss may be simply unaware that they are breaking the law. When taking this into account, the best way to start your solution will involve talking to them to see if they are willing to make a change for you. A short meeting will be all it takes to get the ball rolling with something like this. Of course, it’s worth remembering to keep a cool head, as some people will respond very badly to aggression from their employees.
- Offer A Solution: When a small business lacks resources or know-how, finding a solution to the issues you’ve presented could be a bigger challenge than most people will realise. Thankfully, you have the internet to help you, and finding tools like rota software to keep people working the right amount of hours and safety courses, in which it makes sure that no one gets hurt, it will make your boss’ life much easier. While this will be a little bit of work, it will be worth it to have it, and your complaint will be solved very quickly.
- Leave Your Job: You won’t always be able to get your boss to listen to you when you’re asking them to solve a legal issue. Instead, if you don’t see a solution being put into place, it could be worth simply by looking for something new. There are loads of jobs out there, and it’s never worth working in one which makes you feel unsafe or underappreciated. Not a lot of people decide to go down this route, even when they really should.
- Take Legal Action: As the last solution on this list, it’s time to think about employees who are actively breaking the law. Putting you at risk is never right, and your boss may have to be forced to make things right, forcing you to look into taking legal action. You should be able to get free advice before you get started. Along with this, you will need to find a good lawyer to support your case, as well as other people who have been working for the company and have similar concerns on their mind.
Going into the Future
As you make your way into the future of your work, you will need to keep your mind on several key factors.
It will be easy for your work to slip back into the old routine very quickly, with your boss taking advantage of you like they always have, and you will need to fight against this to avoid letting it happen. To help you with this, taking on some extra work could be the best way to go.
A short HR course will give you all of the skills you need to manage a workplace’s legal needs, and this is something you can propose to your boss as an easy solution to their staffing problems. Of course, they may not be happy to give an additional role like this, but it will be worth talking to them about it to keep it on their mind.
Hopefully, this post will give you the power you need to start fighting back when you’re not being treated fairly at work. If you were too much about in a similar way, your boss wouldn’t be kind to you. Likewise, you need to be thinking of yourself first, as they obviously haven’t been putting enough time into making sure that you are looked after.
