Month: July 2018

A contract of employment is an agreement between an employer and an employee. This contract states your rights and duties as an employee as well as the rights and duties of your employer. These rights are known as -terms’ of contract. The contract doesn’t have to be in writing, but you’re entitled to a written statement of the main terms within two months of starting work.

Your contract of employment should be made up as soon as you accept a job offer and both you and your employer are then bound by its terms until the contract ends or until the terms of your contract are changed.

There are many aspects that have to be covered within your contract of employment so we will start with the basic information which is your job title and job description. Your employer technically doesn’t have to provide you with a job description but it is best that you try and get one as it will give you something to refer back to if you feel you are being forced to do unreasonable tasks, it will also state all of your responsibilities, including any extra ones that you may not have been aware of. Your contract of employment will also state your date of employment. This date of employment is the date that you officially become an employee of this particular employer. As well as showing the date that you officially become and employee, your contract, if not permanent, should state when your employment will end.

Two other aspects that will be placed within your contract of employment is your rate of pay and your hours of work. Your rate of pay will state how much you will be paid per year, before tax has been taken off, and when you will be paid, usually either monthly or weekly. When it comes to your hours of work it is important that you check you’re weekly hours and thoroughly read through your contract to see where you stand with overtime. Some contracts limit the amount of hours that you are able to work a week so checking your contracted hours is important to make sure that you are able to work the amount of hours that you agreed to.

Other aspects that should be placed within your contract of employment is your holiday entitlement and holiday pay. Most full-time workers have a statutory right to 24 days’ paid annual leave, and from 1 April, 2009 this increases to 28 days. There are merely just a few employees that might not automatically be given these rights. As well as having information about your holiday entitlement you will also need sick pay information. This part of your contract of employment will inform you about the amount of pay you are entitled to if you are enable to work due to illness If there are no terms or conditions related to pay due to injury or sickness, the work contract must say so.

Every aspect and detail of your employment should and needs to be stated within your contract of employment. If you feel that any part of your contract of employment is breeched at any time during your employment it is important that you seek professional help to find out where you stand legally.

Throughout an economic depression jobs are tough to come by, and job selection interviews are few and far between, so each stage of the job process becomes more key. Initially you deliver your carefully written resume, after which you hope to get an initial interview, but there is no assurance these days. What this means is that you have to make certain your certification for the employment are what are required, and that your resume objective will stand out from the majority of others. The objective of every stage of the employment process is to take you to the next stage, so the objective of the resume is to get you to the initial interview. That very first job interview has the objective of getting you a second interview, and so on. There may or may not be extra job interviews even after this, depending on the organization and the job itself.

So, stage 1 is to get your resume into the job interview stack. Precisely how can you accomplish this? There are a handful of obvious tips here that have to be pointed out. To start with, verify your spelling and grammar, several times. It won’t hurt to have a good friend to examine your resume looking for spelling blunders, or grammatical errors, as it is very easy to miss these your self when you have been looking at the same document for hours. You’d probably be surprised at how many individuals send out resumes with glaringly obvious mis-spellings in them, a certain way to hit the reject stack. Your resume ought to be as accurate as possible. Do not provide any misleading information or something that is incorrect. Extending the truth is not a good idea, and it could easily backfire on you.

Responding with thank you letters is a good way of continuing to keep your name in front of the company staff, and obviously, you can send your thanks after each phase of the interview procedure. This requires writing to each particular person who has interviewed you, and you should make each correspondence personal and a little different to all the others. Now, it used to be that the letters were always sent by mail, but nowadays e-mail are used more often, and it is becoming the more appropriate type of connection. You could always ask the secretary, or the particular person who set up your employment interview just how the company feels about receiving emails, and go from there. Obviously, you must check the spelling and the sentence structure for each thank you correspondence also.

In a divorce or legal separation, spousal maintenance may be ordered by the court to provide important financial support for one party or the other. Maintenance is paid by one spouse (or former spouse) to the other spouse (or former spouse). Some states refer to such support as alimony, others as spousal support. In any case, the purpose and result is the same, as well discuss in this article.

Historical Basis for Alimony — Times Have Changed

There was a time when traditional marriages were entered into with the understanding and agreement that only death could terminate the bond. A divorce was only possible when there was evidence of marital misconduct, or fault. Once fault was established, the court looked to punish the party responsible for destroying the marriage.

Need for Alimony. Alimony was a solution to a very real economic problem. A divorced womans chances of finding work sufficient to support herself, even marginally so, were not promising. Knowing this, the courts were unwilling to let a husband impoverish his wife if he was guilty of marital misconduct. Receiving alimony sustained the wife who had kept her marriage vows, and paying alimony punished the husband who had not.

Punishing the Wife — No Alimony. A wife who caused the marital breakdown often found herself in immediate, serious financial trouble. Alimony was not generally available to her. The court reasoned that her post-divorce financial woes were the direct consequence of her guilty acts, and the punishment was deemed appropriate.

Punishing the Husband — Pay Alimony. As the family wage-earner, when the husband caused the marital breakdown the court granted the divorce and ordered him to continue supporting his ex-wife — support in the form of alimony. The guilty husband could not escape his obligation to support his wife, even after the divorce. The support was paid weekly or monthly, and could keep the ex-wife in the standard of living to which she had become accustomed during the marriage.

If the parties were unhappily married and both were without fault, then there were no grounds for divorce. Some couples colluded to achieve their desired result — ending a marriage they both wanted out of. When both husband and wife were at fault, the court was still unwilling to dissolve the marriage as they deserved each other and, consequently, were stuck in the marriage.

Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act.

By the middle of the 20th Century, sensibilities about the traditional marriage had changed significantly. Wives increasingly became wage-earners alongside their husbands, and the stigma of divorce was fading. In a sweeping legislative reform, Arizona adopted the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (UMDA), as did Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, and Washington.

The UMDA (1970) allowed for the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage, which could occur without any fault. Today, our Arizona courts cannot consider acts of marital misconduct in deciding whether to award spousal maintenance.

Eligibility for Spousal Maintenance — How It Works Today

In general, when determining the appropriateness of a maintenance award the court must conduct a two-part analysis.

First, A.R.S. 25-319(A):
As a threshold question, a spouse must establish eligibility for alimony. In this first step, be prepared to answer questions like the following:

What property does the spouse have? Is the spouse already self-sufficient? Does the spouse need to stay home to care for a child? Could this spouse earn enough money to be reasonably self-sufficient? Did the marriage last many years, maybe a decade? Was the couple only married for a short time, maybe a year or two? Is the spouse at an age that would make self-sufficiency through employment impossible?

Second, A.R.S. 25-319(B):
Second, the court considers all relevant factors in the family law case. Although the court has broad discretion, the 13 factors presented in the statute provide a framework for the judges analysis. Here are some questions that should be asked, and answered, in this second step:

1. Standard of Living
Did the parties live well? Were they affluent? Did they maintain a high standard of living? Did they live modestly? Did they get by with limited resources?

2. Marriage Duration
How many years were they married to each other? Did the couple invest years in their marriage?

3. Age, Employment, Earning Ability of Supported Spouse
Did the spouse seeking support quit working outside the home to raise their children? What jobs did that spouse have in the past? How much could he or she reasonably earn? What education does that spouse have? Would training or an education improve that spouses employment options?

4. Supporting Spouses Financial Ability
How much does the supporting spouse earn? Can the supporting spouse take care of his or her own reasonable needs, as well as provide support for the other spouse?

5. Comparative Financial Resources and Earning Ability of Both Spouses…

Will one spouse substantially out-earn the other under most circumstances? Does one spouses property interests greatly exceed the others? Is there a significant financial imbalance between the spouses?

6. Contributions from Supported Spouse
Did one spouse maintain the household and care for the children, freeing the other spouse to concentrate his or her efforts on career employment?

7. Extent Supported Spouses Lost Career Opportunities
Did one spouse set aside his or her career, education, or employment goals so the other spouse could get ahead?

8. Ability of Both Spouses to Contribute to Childrens Educational Costs
Will each spouse have sufficient funds to help with the childrens educational costs? Will a spouse only be able to help with the childrens educational expenses if he or she receives help in the form of spousal support?

9. Financial Resources of Supported Spouse
Does the spouse have sufficient property to take care of all his or her needs without financial help? What makes up that spouses community assets?

10. Time Needed for Training or Educational Program
Is it possible for the spouse seeking maintenance to get vocational, college, or university training to improve overall employability? With an education, will that spouse be able to build a sustainable career? How much money would be required to get the necessary education or training? How long will it take to get through that training or educational program?

11. Excessive or Abnormal Expenditures and Concealment
Did the spouse hide property and assets or commit other destructive or wasteful acts?

12. Health Care Insurance Costs
What will be the cost of health care insurance coverage for the spouse seeking support after the divorce?

13. Damages and Judgments from Criminal Conduct
Was there a conviction of domestic violence committed against the other spouse or their child? Were there any other convictions in which the other spouse or child was a victim?

Maricopa County Spousal Maintenance Guidelines.

In an attempt to improve predictability and consistency in awards, the Maricopa Spousal Maintenance Guidelines were developed. The guidelines provide a formula from which a monthly support amount and support duration can be calculated with greater certainty. The formula allows for predictability and uniformity from one case to the next.

Guidelines Are Discretionary. As useful as Maricopas guidelines are, their application is purely discretionary with the court. There is no mandate, or requirement, that a judge use any guidelines at all in his or her maintenance analysis. In the case of Ramsay v. Ramsay, 224 Ariz. 467, 232 P3d 1249 (Ariz.App. 2010), the Court of Appeals stated once again that:

There are no legally authoritative guidelines governing spousal maintenance in Maricopa County or any other Arizona county. A.R.S. 25-319(B) vests the trial court with broad discretion to determine the amount and duration of spousal maintenance awards after due consideration of the factors that the Legislature articulated. The statute does not direct the court to refer to any set of guidelines, and the court’s disregard of any such informal reference materials cannot give rise to a finding of abuse of discretion.

The best approach to resolving spousal maintenance issues is by thorough preparation. Substantiating a spouses position on maintenance, with strong supporting evidence on each of the 13 factors, may be pivotal in achieving a favorable outcome in the case.