Hi, students.
Hope you're well.
My name is Jade Joddle.
And in today's Business English lesson,
I'm going to teach you about the vocabulary of work in the UK.
This is a great lesson for you to watch
if you're interested in business topics
and also if you live in the UK because you might not
be that familiar with all of these terms
but they're good to know.
Let's start with an important one--
National Insurance number.
You need this in order to legally work in the UK.
It's a number that identifies you personally.
And it will be linked with you throughout your life.
And this number keeps track of your pension contributions
so you always have to put it in forms.
It helps identify you.
And let's break the word up a bit.
National Insurance-- this is a portion of tax
that we have to pay in the UK, which goes towards pensions,
and unemployment pay, and things like maternity leave.
So let's move on and talk about permanent employees.
These are people who have a contract to work for a company.
A permanent employee has the full benefits and rights
that are possible to have.
This means things like they get sick pay,
they get holiday pay, they get redundancy pay.
They also have the right to unionize,
to be in a union, which means to go on strike if they're not
happy about their working conditions.
This kind of employee pays their tax,
the money they have to give to the government,
via a system that's called PAYE, pay as you earn.
This means that the permanent employee never
sees a portion of their salary because it's taken out straight
away and given to the government as a tax.
And it is the employer that is responsible for making
these deductions and paying it as tax.
And the employer has to pay a portion of National Insurance,
the tax, and the permanent employee
pays a portion as well.
Let's talk now about worker.
In ordinary everyday conversation,
we might say employee and worker to mean the same thing.
However, from a legal point of view
or a tax point of view, someone who is a worker,
it's a different definition.
We can think of it this way.
A worker is someone who works on a more
casual basis for a company.
They do still have some rights.
These are the rights that apply to everybody.
You can't discriminate against a worker.
And they must have the minimum-- they
must be paid the minimum wage.
However, unlike the permanent employee,
they don't get redundancy pay and they're not
allowed to be in a union.
Think of the company Uber.
There was an important court case
that ruled that Uber drivers are workers for Uber.
And this meant that Uber now has to pay drivers
the minimum wage and--
well, ensure that they get paid the minimum wage.
And also, Uber has to pay them holiday pay.
Which brings us now to the self-employed.
Someone who is self-employed works for themselves
and, unlike permanent employees, is
responsible for paying their own tax.
So they have to submit what's called
a self-assessment every year.
And they have to be very careful about keeping money aside
from the earnings to pay their tax themselves.
And self-employed people, they come in all different shapes
and sizes, you can say.
Some of them have established companies
and they are one person working in that company.
And others operate as what's called sole traders.
These are one-person businesses but they haven't officially
set up a company for that.
So a sole trader is liable for--
they are responsible for--
any debts.
Whereas a self-employed person who's established a company,
they can be separated.
They can be separated from the financial aspect
of their business.
Moving on, we have freelancer.
We use this word generally to describe a person who delivers
creative or technical work.
But they are a self-employed person.
So freelancer-- we can think of it this way--
is free to do different jobs for different companies
for different people.
Next we have independent contractor,
so type of self-employment where the self-employed person has
established their own company.
And with this, they have a contract
to provide services to a company.
But they are not legally classed as a permanent employee
of that company.
From the independent contractors side,
it was advantageous to them because it meant that they
could be paid more money.
They earn more, a lot more in many cases,
than a permanent employee.
And also because they're operating out
of their own business, they can claim expenses for the work
that they're doing.
However, the government didn't like this arrangement
that was going on because they said that in some cases,
this was a case of disguised employment, which meant hidden.
What they meant is that often, independent contractors
we're doing exactly the same thing
as the permanent employees.
They just had it set up so that they could pay less tax.
And because the government didn't like that,
they brought in some legislation called IR35 legislation.
And they closed what was called a tax loophole.
A tax loophole is a way you can find to not pay as much tax.
Let's look over here now.
What's a temp?
A temp is short for a temporary worker.
This is someone who, as a contractor,
works for a company.
But the contract expires after a certain amount of time.
So it's anything up to a year working for a company.
And the reason that there might be temporary contracts
is, for example, to cover someone who is on leave.
If someone's on maternity leave, the temporary member of staff
can do their job until they're ready to return.
And the temporary work usually earns more per hour
than the permanent employee.
The temps, or the temporary staff,
they are employed through an agency, a temping agency.
And what the agency do is they handle all of the recruitment,
they find the people to do the job,
and they arrange the contracts so
that they can work for the hirer for a period of time.
And what the agency also does is take care
of any tax that has to be paid.
Next, we've got gig worker.
This is a much more modern word for newer kinds of work.
So someone who is a gig worker earns money
through performing gigs or doing gigs via internet companies.
Think of a UberEats delivery person.
So every time they do a gig, deliver food to a customer,
they get paid.
They get paid a gig.
And the website gets paid to connect the two people.
Let's talk now about what a zero-hours contract is.
This is when the company you work for
doesn't guarantee you a set number of hours
to work per week.
Perhaps some weeks they'll want you to come and work
40 hours a week but in other weeks,
when they know they're not going to be busy,
they might only offer you 10 hours that week.
Because their work is so unpredictable,
the employee can say no to the hours that
are offered to them, legally.
I don't know how that works in practice a lot of the time.
Now we have cash in hand.
This sort of work is when a person gets paid to do a job
but they don't report it.
They don't report it in terms of paying tax.
So when we say cash in hand, it means that cash was--
cash was given and there's no receipts or anything
to trace the money.
This sort of work is illegal in the UK.
And then finally, we've got pay slip down here,
someone who works for a company, is
going to receive this document every week
or every month, which shows the different deductions
from their salary.
It's going to include things like the National
Insurance that they paid or their employer paid,
their pension contributions.
And it will also say the number of hours worked,
and any overtime, and that sort of thing.
So thank you for listening to today's--
watching today's Business English lesson.
I do have a Business English Vocabulary course.
So if you liked this lesson, be sure to have a look at that
and join it.
And thank you for watching.
I'll see you again soon.
Bye.