Ontario Labour laws pertaining to late breaks Ontario Labour laws state: An employee must not work for more than five hours in a row without getting a 30-minute eating period (meal break) free from work. However, if the employer and employee agree, the eating period can be split into two eating periods within every five consecutive hours. Together these must total at least 30 minutes. This agreement can be oral or in writing. https://www.ontario.ca/document/your-guide-employment-standards-act-0/hours-work Does this say that a employer may not force the employee to take a late lunch if that lunch starts after they have worked for 5 hours? That is to say, must breaks be scheduled in a way that workers are not working more than 5 hours uninterrupted?
The page you link is a good summary. It describes the employer obligations under the Ontario Employment Standards Act. Eating periods are described at section 20: 20 (1) An employer shall give an employee an eating period of at least 30 minutes at intervals that will result in the employee working no more than five consecutive hours without an eating period. Exception (2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the employer and the employee agree, whether or not in writing, that the employee is to be given two eating periods that together total at least 30 minutes in each consecutive five-hour period. This section has been applied several times by the Ontario Labour Relations Board and appears to have been given its plain meaning. There are two ways that the Act lets an employer provide those breaks: Provide full 30-minute eating period(s) so that the employee works no more than five consecutive hours without an eating period. By agreement, provide two eating periods that total 30 minutes, &quot;in each consecutive five-hour period&quot; If proceeding by option two, the 30 minutes of eating period have to occur &quot;in each consecutive five-hour period.&quot; The Ontario Labour Relations Board has described these two options and has said that option two requires the breaks to be &quot;within&quot; each consecutive five-hour period. See Rusty's at Blue Inc. / M &amp; S Accounting v Erica Solmes, 2022 CanLII 56373 (paragraph 125, emphasis in original): Section 20 requires an employer to give an employee an eating period of 30 minutes after no more than five consecutive hours of work, or (with the agreement of the employee) two eating periods totalling 30 minutes within each consecutive five-hour period. Whether an employee is entitled to a single 30-minute eating period or to two eating periods totalling 30 minutes, the eating periods must be uninterrupted. The other answer and the page you link also describes an &quot;exceptional circumstances&quot; exception, but that is describing section 19 of the Act. Those exceptional circumstances can only let an employer get around the requirements of sections 17 and 18. Those are not relevant to the eating-period requirements. An employer may require an employee to work more than the maximum number of hours permitted under section 17 or to work during a period that is required to be free from performing work under section 18 only as follows
is it legally acceptable to state that 7.5 hours is the standard amount No. Because you are a contractor not employee, there is no "standard" to refer to. You are only entitled to what your contract provides for, that is £N per day no matter how much time you worked. That said, if there is no word "overtime" in the contract, you cannot use one to justify how much you charge. You can, though, charge for weekend days (unless the contract explicitly prohibits working on weekends). what should be done about going into the future with this work and asking for a revised contract? 1) Learn the lesson; 2) Make up your mind about what you want to be paid for: hours, days or output; 3) Discuss/negotiate contract terms with your clients.
No, they are not obliged to take you back early As you say in your TL;DR you arranged 4 months leave and your employer no doubt made arrangements to deal with your absence. Now, you want to return early; they are not obliged to allow you to do so just as you would not be obliged to do so if they wanted you to cut your leave short. No doubt the current pandemic has changed the situation and in its absence, they might have been more willing to have you back early. But then, you wouldn't want to be coming back early. Your employment status is that you are employed and on leave. Subject to the details of your employment contract; there is nothing stopping you taking another job - there is a huge demand for logistics workers particularly in the health sector at the moment; much of it unskilled work. dIf you want to be unemployed, you can always resign.
Who entered the contract with the restaurant? In order for the restaurant to collect from a person, that person must have entered into a contract for the meal. That is, from the restaurant's point of view, they must have indicated that they would like some food and, since everyone knows how restaurants work, they know that the food will have to be paid for. Whether a given person entered a contract will depend on the specific facts. If they opened their mouth and said to the waiter something like “I’ll have the chicken”, they almost certainly entered a contract and they are obliged to pay. This is even if they had an expectation that someone else would pay for them - the restaurant is not involved in any other contracts or arrangements you might have with third-parties. You ordered, you’re on the hook. In a situation where you didn’t order, the answer is still probably yes, you have to pay. Again, because you know how restaurants work, by eating the meal that was placed in front of you rather than saying, “Just so you know, your contract for this meal is with that guy over there, is that okay?”, you probably entered a contract by your action of eating the meal. More broadly, when a group collectively enters a contract with the restaurant, they are probably agreeing with the restaurant that they will be jointly and severally bound. That is, each is responsible for all and the restaurant can pursue any or all of the people they have a contract with. A minor dining with their parents is probably not entering a contract with the restaurant. Not because minors can’t enter contracts (they absolutely can) but because of the normal expectation that the parent is entering the contract. This is because of a principle that contract terms may be implied by custom. That is, if there is a general understanding that this is the way things are done, then that will be something the law will enforce. This is a simple expedient adopted in order to make the world work - if every term of every contract had to be explicitly detailed in advance this would be a) unworkable and b) impossible. Even if there is no contract, the restaurant has equitable remedies like unjust enrichment. The diner has had the benefit of the meal and it would be unjust if the restaurant was left out of pocket. Equitable remedies can be even more complicated than contract law so we’ll just leave it at that. As for whether the restaurant will accept a promise from one diner that another will pay, that’s up to them.
You are perfectly within your rights not to tip. Unless you start your dining experience with &quot;I'm not going to be tipping you tonight, just to let you know.&quot; you will get the same service as anyone else. Most businesses are within their rights to ask you to leave for any reason except those explicitly prohibited by law. So conceivably if you started off with the preceding sentence, the manager could ask you to leave. Not tipping wait staff at most restaurants is still an awful thing to do. No customers like tipping. Unfortunately, tipped staff can and usually are paid well below the conventional minimum wage. That they can be, is codified into law and would take a substantial amount of effort to change. Business owners are able to push the cost of paying their employees a livable wage onto their customers, and we are forced to accept it. It's a hideously flawed system that is ever so slowly changing, but it doesn't change the fact that if everyone decided not to tip, the wait staff in 95% of restaurants wouldn't be able to survive on their 'wages'. So you are within your rights not to tip, you probably won't suffer anything negative unless you are aggressively up front about the fact that you aren't going to tip, and you will be punishing the person with the least power in the equation for the fact that you don't like how the system works over here. Tipping a bartender is different and usually less necessary, and more likely to be drink is four bucks and a bit, here's a fiver keep the change. Tipping less or more than that may change the speed at which you get refills or attention.
Indeed, article 3.24 of the Arbeidsomstandighedenbesluit: Toiletten en wastafels In een bedrijf of inrichting zijn in de nabijheid van de ruimten waar de werknemers hun werkzaamheden verrichten een voldoende aantal toiletten aanwezig. In of in de onmiddellijke nabijheid van de ruimten waarin de toiletten zich bevinden zijn voldoende wastafels. De toiletten of het gebruik van de toiletten zijn naar seksen gescheiden. My translation (intentionally less idiomatic than it might be in order to parallel the Dutch word order): Toilets and lavatories In a business or facility there are in the vicinity of the areas where the workers perform their work a sufficient number of toilets present. In, or in the immediate vicinity of, the areas where the toilets are, there are sufficient lavatories. The toilets or the use of the toilets are segregated by sex. It's a very long law, so I haven't read it all, but it doesn't seem to impose a penalty on people who disregard the sex segregation of the toilets. I suspect that it imposes a responsibility on the employer to enforce the segregation, and presumably a penalty could be imposed on the employer for failing to do so. I do not know what mechanisms would be available to the employer to penalize an employee who uses the wrong toilet. I don't know anything about the catering industry, and I cannot infer why you ask about it specifically. If you're asking about toilets provided by such businesses for their customers, however, I suspect it's likely to be governed by another law. (I further suspect that sex-segregated toilets for customers are optional in at least some circumstances, since small bars and restaurants often have only one toilet.)
The legal reasons for dismissal in the UK are described here: it includes such things as being unable to do your job, redundancy, violence on the job, being sent to prison, the factory burning down. It does not include quitting. &quot;Unfair dismissal&quot; is described here, and it says Situations when your dismissal is likely to be unfair include if you...resigned and gave the correct notice period This page then describes recourse for unfair dismissal. §108(1) of the Employment Rights Act says that Section 94 does not apply to the dismissal of an employee unless he has been continuously employed for a period of not less than two years ending with the effective date of termination. §94(1) then says that &quot;An employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed by his employer&quot;. §108(2) also lists numerous cases where the two-year tenure condition does not apply. Most of those reasons clearly don't apply to the act of giving notice (it includes e,g, pregnancy, whistle-blowing etc), which means that any firing because an employee is pregnant (etc.) is automatically unfair, regardless of duration of employment. §104 which is within the set of conditions that are &quot;automatically unfair&quot; is &quot;Assertion of statutory right&quot;, (1)An employee who is dismissed shall be regarded for the purposes of this Part as unfairly dismissed if the reason (or, if more than one, the principal reason) for the dismissal is that the employee— (a)brought proceedings against the employer to enforce a right of his which is a relevant statutory right, or (b)alleged that the employer had infringed a right of his which is a relevant statutory right. However, the reason for being fired in this case has nothing to do with bringing proceedings against the employer, or alleging infringement of a statutory right. As far as I can determine, being fired because you quit is not deemed automatically unfair in the sense of short-circuiting the two year employment requirement; and for an employee with less than two years of service, no justification is necessary.
According to the EEOC, in general: An employee cannot be forced to participate (or not participate) in a religious activity as a condition of employment. But how religious is this party? Simply calling it a "Christmas party" (or "holiday party") doesn't really make it a "religious activity". Many nonreligious people celebrate Christmas as a general holiday. If the party is nonreligious, then your religion is mostly irrelevant, whether or not it celebrates a winter holiday. The law requires an employer or other covered entity to reasonably accommodate an employee's religious beliefs or practices, unless doing so would cause more than a minimal burden on the operations of the employer's business. This means an employer may be required to make reasonable adjustments to the work environment that will allow an employee to practice his or her religion. So, they'd likely have to serve something you could eat if they're serving food, as that would be a reasonable accommodation. (But you'd have to inform them of your needs beforehand; asking them to go out and buy something during the party would probably not be "reasonable".)