Home Working Jobs: Careers, Rights and Responsibilities

Working from home can be an attractive proposition.  Workers have more time to enjoy with your family and friends, as well as saving time and money by having no more daily commute.

However, working from home isn’t for everyone and it is important to understand just what working from home involves and how it differs from working ‘in-house’.

What Is Home Working?

A home worker is anyone that works from home and there are a wide variety of jobs that are suitable for home working. These include:

• Virtual assistant
• Content writer
• Music teacher
• Childminder
• Call handler
• Many freelance jobs such as proofreaders and editors

Workers does many office based jobs from home as more and more companies are employing homeworkers to save money on large and expensive business premises.

Home Working Rights

The employment rights as a homeworker depend upon your legal status.

Workers tend to do casual or irregular work.

Rights:

• The National Living Wage
• Statutory levels of holidays
• Protection from unlawful deductions from wages
• Statutory minimum rest breaks
• Protection against unlawful
• The right to not work more than 48 hours per week (unless they have opted out)
• Protection from whistle blowing and unlawful discrimination including being treated less favourably for being a part-time employee.

Employees tend to work regularly and are generally required to do a minimum number of hours per week/month.

Rights : An employee has all the rights of a worker as well as

• Statutory sick pay, maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave pay.
• Statutory redundancy pay
• The right to request flexible working
• Unfair dismissal protection
• Minimum notice periods of employment ends

Self-employed people employ themselves in their own businesses.

Rights: If someone is self-employed then they don’t have any of the rights of an employee as employment law does not apply to them because they are their own boss. They aren’t paid through PAYE (Pay-As-You-Earn tax) and are responsible for the success or failure of their own business.

It is possible to be both employed and self-employed at the same time, for example if a person works for an employer on weekdays and then runs their own business on weekends.