Mara Thorne's Blog – March 2012 Archive (2)

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…