Mara Thorne's Page

Teachers are in the news again, with allegations that it takes too long and is too difficult to dismiss poorly performing teachers. In the private sector, it is argued, incompetent employees can be given their marching orders much more easily, whereas in the public sector it can take up to a year to remove somebody.

So what are the grounds on which an employee may be fairly dismissed, and what should an employer do, faced with an employee…

Volunteers, interns, youngsters on work experience .... a great source of free labour, no need to worry about paying them the National Minimum Wage, right?

Wrong! There is considerable confusion among employers about when they do and don’t need to pay people they take on for “work experience” purposes.

Various schemes exist to help young people without any…

If one of your employees was signed off sick by their doctor, and sent you a postcard from the Costa del Sol, I expect your hackles would rise. Like most employers, you would probably think somebody who was too sick to work should be too sick to go on holiday.

But it’s not quite that simple. For a start, somebody who is unfit to work due to stress or fatigue, or who is recuperating after surgery, may be perfectly capable of lying on a beach – in fact it may assist…

It’s not always easy to draw the line between what people do in their own time, which is arguably not the employer’s concern, and what happens in the workplace.  Surely, it is not the employer’s place to dictate what their employees do in the evenings or at weekends?

Live and let live!…