Recruitment and pay: who you may hire and what you must pay them

1. Employment law sets the minimum standards a business must meet when it hires, pays and manages the people who work for it, and a small firm gets no exemption from them.
2. Recruitment: jobs must be open to everyone who could do them, selection must rest on ability to do the job, and the person hired must be given a written contract setting out pay, hours, holiday and notice.
   1. You word the advert so it does not shut out a group who could do the work, such as asking for a young and energetic person when age has nothing to do with the task.
   2. You interview every candidate against the same criteria and keep a written record of why the successful one was chosen, so the decision can be shown to rest on ability if it is later challenged.
3. Pay: workers must be paid at least the legal minimum for their age, paid on the agreed date, given a payslip showing what has been deducted, and men and women must receive equal pay for equal work.
   1. The National Minimum Wage is set by the government and rises from time to time, so the rate is not something an owner negotiates separately with each worker.
   2. This puts a floor under the wage bill that the business cannot go below whatever its profits, so a firm having a bad year still pays the full rate to every member of staff.
4. Equal pay means the same rate for the same work, so paying a female warehouse picker less than a male picker doing an identical job breaks the law even if she agreed to the lower rate.

Discrimination: treating someone worse because of who they are

1. Under the Equality Act 2010 a business must not treat someone worse because of a protected characteristic such as age, sex, race, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, pregnancy or marriage.
   1. The rule covers hiring, pay, promotion, training and dismissal, so passing a worker over for promotion because she has told you she is pregnant is unlawful even though her pay is untouched.
2. Reasonable adjustments go further than equal treatment, because a disabled worker needs the workplace changed rather than simply left alone, and the cost of that change falls on the employer.

Health and safety: a safe place, safe equipment and trained people

1. The business must provide a safe workplace, equipment that is safe to use, and training in the hazards of the job before a worker is left to do it alone.
   1. Protective equipment such as gloves, goggles or non-slip shoes must be supplied free where the job needs it, and accidents must be recorded, with the serious ones reported to the authorities.
2. In practice this means a written risk assessment for each task, a maintenance schedule for machinery, and paid staff hours spent on training rather than on producing output.
3. A bakery in Leeds would assess hot ovens, the slicing machine and wet floors, then fit a guard to the slicer and lay non-slip matting, which costs money before a single extra loaf is sold.

What employment law means for the business

1. Meeting these duties raises costs, because wages sit at or above the legal floor, training takes paid hours, guards and protective equipment have to be bought, and someone has to keep the contracts, payslips and accident records up to date.
2. That spending buys something back, since staff who are paid properly and kept safe leave less often, so the business recruits and retrains fewer replacements and loses fewer days to injury.
3. A reputation as a fair employer widens the pool of people willing to apply, which matters most to a small firm competing for staff against larger employers on the same high street.