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Holiday entitlement and the Working Time
Directive
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Opinion
In our opinion, the practice
of deducting holiday entitlement from a freelancer's rate is
a cynical workaround by employers, in order to discharge the
responsibility imposed on them by the Working Time Directive.
It is an attempt to respect the letter of the law while frustrating
its spirit - the spirit which says that all workers should receive
four weeks of holiday, paid at their basic rate, by their employer,
and not by themselves.
The intention of the original
Directive is that no situation should lead to workers being discouraged
from taking holiday time. But the practice of deducting holiday
pay from within a freelancer's rate means that from a financial
point of view, payment in lieu has actually become a more attractive
alternative than taking the holiday during the contract. Getting
to the end of a contract without taking any paid holiday is the
only way that a freelancer can recover what he considers to be
his full rate.
At the moment we have a system
of arbitrary inconsistency, where some employers give their workers
the entitlement to paid holiday on top of their rate, and others
don't, whether due to policy or budget. But paid holiday time
is a legal liability, not a luxury to be determined by how rich
the employer is feeling at the time - and certainly not a liability
which the freelance community should be subsidising.
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