Sports Direct “pay claim”
Tuesday 11th August 2015
The Guardian has reported that Unite has submitted a pay claim to Sports Direct asking the retailer to move thousands of zero-hours workers on to permanent contracts and pay a living wage of £7.85 per hour.
Bryony Goldspink, employment solicitor at Gordons, says “The article is not about a Tribunal claim (as such a claim does not exist) but representations made by Unite to Sports Direct. What is not very clear from the article is that the workers in question are in fact agency workers. What Unite are asking Sports Direct to do is to employ those workers directly as Sports Direct employees. The article makes out that Sports Direct is the ‘bad employer’ and zero-hour contracts amount to exploitation but fails to recognise that for many workers zero-hour contracts and working through an agency is in fact preferable due to the flexibility it offers.”
Click here to read the article in The Guardian.
If you would like to discuss this article in further detail, please contact Bryony Goldspink, on 0113 227 0307 or at bryony.goldspink@gordonsllp.com.