Labor Law

Leave a company and an individual to settle working conditions between themselves and the terms tilt one way. One side is handing out the job and the other side needs one. With a product you can walk away when the price looks wrong; with a job, walking away is much harder. Labor law starts from the assumption that agreement alone doesn't produce fair terms, and draws a floor underneath the negotiation that neither side can go below.

What happens in a small company without that floor tends to look the same every time. Someone starts work on day one with no contract, and the salary and hours exist only as things said in an interview. Nothing goes wrong for months. It all surfaces at the exit: the severance calculation needs a start date that the two sides remember differently, and the months of routine late nights turn into one person saying that was covered by the salary and the other saying they never heard that.

Without records, the company usually comes off worse in that argument. Writing the terms down and handing them over is the employer's duty, so the absence of a document is itself the employer's failure.

Labor law sets a floor and voids any agreement that goes under it, even one both sides signed. A contract clause saying paid leave won't be taken loses its force on its own while the rest of the contract stands, and the leave accrues as the statute says. Three points are where it binds.

1. On the way in. The employer must produce a written contract covering pay, working hours, and holidays, and hand the employee a copy. Skipping it draws a fine and strips the company of its evidence if a dispute arrives. A probation period only counts if its length and terms are written into that contract, and probation does not mean someone can be dismissed at will — what gets examined is whether the criteria were communicated in advance.
2. During employment. Lines are drawn around both time and money. The ceiling on weekly hours comes from the statutory working hour cap, and hours beyond the standard week are paid at a premium on top. A minimum wage is set fresh each year, paid leave accrues for anyone past a year of service, and mandatory social insurance — pension, health, employment, and industrial accident cover — attaches during this stretch.
3. On the way out. Dismissal comes with procedure attached. There has to be a justified reason, the dismissal has to be given in writing, and it has to be announced at least 30 days ahead or paid out in lieu of that notice. Anyone past a year of service receives severance. Letting people go because the business is struggling carries stricter requirements again.

Scope also varies with company size. Workplaces under five regular employees are exempt from a set of provisions — overtime and night premiums, annual paid leave, and the unfair dismissal remedy among them. That threshold means a team of four picks up a whole set of obligations in the month it becomes five.

Because this regulation binds the team rather than the product, it is the item most often missing from a builder's field of view. Four places is where it actually turns up.

Hiring is the first. An offer has to carry the salary, the hours, and the probation terms, and what it says has to match the contract signed later. When you state a salary, state how much of it is base salary — the fixed portion — as well.

Second is designing how people work. Letting everyone set their own start time or deciding how far remote work extends looks like a free choice of work arrangement, but it runs straight into the question of how hours get counted. Time worked at home at night is working time if the company asked for it.

Third is on-call rotation on the engineering side. Someone takes a shift to receive incident calls during set hours, and whether the waiting itself counts as working time depends on how often calls actually come and how constrained the person is. Set the compensation rule when the rotation is created, or it has to be recalculated backwards later.

The last is scheduling. The habit of absorbing a slipped date by working flat out for the two weeks before launch collides directly with the hours ceiling. Staying under it means adding people or cutting scope, so this item shows up as a planning problem before it ever shows up as a legal one.

"Their start date is next week and the draft contract still isn't out."

The terms have to be written and handed over before day one, and the paperwork is late.

"That clause has no force even if both sides agree to it."

The promise goes below the statutory floor, so writing it down changes nothing.

"We hit five people next month, so more of this starts applying."

Crossing the headcount threshold adds provisions the company now has to meet.

Pagedeck cleaned up years of backlog when it reached 45 people. Five early members had joined with no contract at all, and for two of them the recorded start date differed depending on who you asked.

Grace brought in a labor attorney and spent two months rewriting the contracts. The longest part wasn't the paperwork — it was deciding how the on-call rotation should be paid. Theo's team had been taking weekend shifts for a flat amount whether calls came or not, and treating that as working time rather than a standby allowance changed the math. Decided before the rotation started, it would have been an hour's work.

The most common assumption is that an agreement between two willing parties settles it. Contracts form by mutual consent, so the belief is a reasonable one to hold. But conditions set by labor law cannot be lowered by agreement. A clause trading away paid leave for a higher salary, or an arrangement paying severance out in monthly instalments, has no effect even with both signatures on it. The dangerous part for the employer is that only the clause dies while the contract survives. Money already paid out is hard to recover, and the statutory entitlement can still be claimed separately, so what looked like a saving goes out twice.

Assuming a small company is exempt is the other one. Some provisions genuinely don't apply below five employees, which makes this belief awkwardly half-right. But only some drop out: the duty to issue a written contract, the minimum wage, and severance apply with a single employee. Companies also tend to grow. Coverage widens the month the fifth person arrives while the old habits stay in place, and that is when the backwards recalculation lands.