Protection and private medical insurance intermediaries would need to prove additional hours are reasonable where they seek to take action against an adviser for ‘quiet quitting’.
The trend currently sweeping TikTok encourages workers to do only what their job demands and nothing more.
But according to employment lawyer Jacqueline McDermott, partner at Keystone Law, for any intermediary intent on firing workers engaged in such activity, this could be easier said than done.
“It is not a commercial agreement between one company and another, McDermott told Health & Protection. “It’s a contract imposed by an employer on an individual who doesn’t necessarily have the ability to get legal advice and negotiate it.
“For that reason – that the employee is not in a strong negotiating position, those kinds of cases when they go to court, are interpreted in favour of the employee.”
Consequently McDermott explains employers need to look at whether additional hours required in order to carry out the job are “reasonable”.
“The word reasonable is important there because if you are working many hours a day, several hours when you get home outside your contracted hours and it’s eating into your private time with your family, is that reasonable? So you have to draw a line between what is reasonable and every day all the time – is it reasonable?
“If it’s every now and then when you have a particular deal or function going on, you might require somebody to work a couple of extra hours several days a week over a couple of weeks – it might be a seasonal thing, then it might be reasonable. But if it’s all the time then it’s not reasonable.”