Contract Types
A contract is a legal agreement in which you sign to agree to abide by the rules of that certain job. In the contract it will include how many hours you are supposed to work, how many holidays you are allowed per year, what your pay is and if you are contracted to work certain days every single week.
Contracts are important so that both parties of the signed agreement understand what they expect from the imployee and the imployee understands what is expected of them.
There are many different types of contracts, such as:
- Part Time Contracts
- Full Time Contracts
- Casual Contracts
- Fixed Term Contracts
- Freelance Contracts
- On Completion Contracts
Each one is a different type and you sign up to different things.
Part time contracts are usually people in college or in education. You are contracted to only work up to 16-18hrs for an 18 year old. Under 18 is less. An advantage of part time is that you can get extra money on top of what you are doing whether your working or in college, a disadvantage is that there isn't always work. An example of this is if you are working as a waitress in a restaurant and you only work when its busy or when you are needed, so you may only work up to 5 hours a week which isn't alot, and another week you may end up working 16 hours, just depends on how busy the restaurant is.
Full time contracts are 37 - 39 hours per week. An advantage of this is that you have guarenteed work each week, a disadvantage of this is that you don't have much free time to do other things. Or that you may be on a low waige such as a runner for a tv production may only get £15,000 and may not cover there living costs depending on where they are living, this means that they have to get a part time job on top of this working in there spare time.
Casual contracts are similar to temporary contracts, you may only work for a certain amount of time for one thing or you work when a company needs you, such as a photographer may get a contract to take photos for a magazine for 1 month then move on to the next job. An advantage of this is that you can get jobs easy as you have experience in working in different companies, another advantage is that you only work when someone needs you, this can also be a disadvantage as you may be down on money because of it. Another disadvantage of this is that you may not get work for a while.
Fixed term contracts are also similar to temporary, it means that they are employed to work for a certain amount of time. At the start, a contract will be signed to agree the period of time which will be worked. After that period of time is up with employer can decide whether to keep them on and put them on a new contract depending on how they worked in the previous one, or let them go to find another job.
Free-lance contracts are self employed workers. This means that they don't work for any company but their own. They have to advertise their own company them selves and build a reputation through their own clientele, also by word of mouth whether if people like the work they have done then tell their friends and so on. Free lancers tend to get paid hourly with the jobs they are given, so depending how long the job is they may not get as much money as others. However, free lancers only get paid when doing a job, so if they haven't done a job in a week or so, they don't get paid for it.
On Completion contracts can be for any amount of time. They are given a certain amount of time that the job has to be completed for which they are then paid after if they meet the deadline the client has given them. An example of this is if a client gave a producer and director a deadline to create a an advertising video for a specific thing which the client then expects to be completed.
