As An Employee When Should I Seek Help From An Employment Solicitor?

As an employee of a company, especially if it is a large multinational one,you can sometimes feel like that large mass of regulations, provisions, laws and statutes that is collectively called UK employment law is a vast and confusing set of laws that you would need to study in order to understand. While this not technically true, the fact that UK employment law is an ongoing process and evolving body of law can make it difficult keep up with sometimes.

In theory employees and employers exist in mutually beneficial yet antagonistic relationship with one another. Whenever one gains the other is likely to have lost. This means that while the employee is searching for better pay and working conditions the employer is looking to make things run more efficiently and more profitably. These two goals can, and frequently do, rub up against each other in the workplace and both employers and employees can be found to have cut corners, bent or broken rules and behaved in an inappropriate manner. In these situations, where the victim wants to, it is beneficial to enlist the help of an employment solicitor.

For an employee there are a multitude of reasons why they could want to seek justice, but there are a number of main types of cases in which enlisting the help of an employment solicitor would be helpful. The main reason is that the employer has committed a breach of contract against the employee. This could allow discriminatory or bullying practices to proliferate in the workplace, to not providing proper notice to employees during the redundancy process. One of the most common breaches of contract is the failure of the employer to take into account an employee's statutory employment rights (provisions like the minimum wage for example). The other main type of grievance that may require the help of an employment solicitor is the employer's failure to pay the employees wages or other forms of compensation. The third is when an employer does not provide a safe and appropriate or healthy place for their employees to work in.

An employment solicitor may be able to help employees settle these matters using the company's own internal grievance and appeals procedures or they may provide guidance and assistance in taking the complaint before the Employment Tribunal, in which their experience and knowledge of the formal procedures and process of the tribunal itself could prove invaluable.