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Employment law case study

I have chosen an optional module in employment law and I have a case study that I need to complete for it. If anyone could give me any tips/advice of where to start it would be greatly appreciated as law is completely new to me, the joy of being able to choose optional modules outside of your subject area hey! Anyway, below is the case study :smile:

Assignment Outline: Please answer the following case study question.
The Dream Group is a small chain of luxury hotels in the Yorkshire region.

Food and beverage assistants are employed to work at each hotel via open-ended contracts of service with a pre-defined number of weekly hours. The times and hours of work for each food and beverage assistant were set out in the letter of appointment that they received before starting work and in a statement summarising the terms of employment. The senior management team is proposing to change the way that the food and beverage service is staffed in order to better deal with the seasonal variability of demand that affects the sector. The senior management team are also looking to cut costs and make savings following a dip in profits last year.

The approach that is currently favoured by senior management is to employ food and beverage assistants on a casual basis with no set hours of work. Each assistant will call a manager at the beginning of the working week and will sign up for whatever hours are available that week, there will be no obligation on the assistant to work a minimum number of hours and there will be no obligation on the hotel to provide any hours. The assistant can be assigned to any of the hotels within the group. The senior management team think that organising work in this way may also bring more flexibility to the management of staff by making it easier to ‘hire and fire’ staff (particularly those who are underperforming).

The senior management team also proposes to cut costs by removing some of the perks that food and beverage assistants currently enjoy; these include free access to the gym and spa facilities for assistants and their immediate family and a hot meal during a shift.

Sarah is a long serving food and beverage assistant and single mother of two young children. When Sarah is at work her children attend a nursery situated just across the street from the hotel where she works. Sarah is pleased with the nursery but places are scarce and she has to sign her children up for their places three months in advance, the nursery offers very little flexibility to change planned attendance. Nevertheless the nursery is famed for providing high quality food to the children and as Sarah gets a hot meal when she is at work she doesn’t have to cook on work days. At the weekends Sarah and her children go for a swim in the hotel’s swimming pool.

Jamil started working as a food and beverage assistant fairly recently. He is very good at his job and is pleased with his hours because he doesn’t work on a Friday which means that he can go to Friday prayers at the Mosque. For religious reasons Jamil is not comfortable serving alcohol and has worked with his manager to ensure that his duties are focussed around food and hot beverages.

Advise Sarah and Jamil about what their legal position would be should the management team begin to implement the changes, then advise management about how they should manage the changes they seek to implement (in light of their legal obligations).