Company refusing to issue paper payslips - legalities?

[eccles]

98elise said:

REALIST123 said:

All that jazz said:

PurpleMoonlight said:

https://www.gov.uk/payslips

Edited by PurpleMoonlight on Friday 26th August 06:12

Thanks. Useful. Re your earlier comment, if you've ever tried to teach the internet/email to someone well into their senior years you would know that "surely this isn't that difficult" is about as far from reality as you can get.

Garbage. I have many aquaintances "well into their senior years". Without exception they're on line and quite happy communicating by e mail. Most have smart phones and know how to use them, too.

Might I suggest that your freind's issue may be to do with reasons other than age?

Agreed. My mother is in her 70's and normally hates change. Getting her to use a tablet has been a easy. She actually looks to sort issues out herself as she knows that there will be a menu somewhere that she can use to get things working.

She uses email and Facebook with no issues, and does her shopping and banking on line. These days being on line is no harder than operating a TV.

For every story about old people adapting easily to technology I would say there is an equivalent one where either they see no need for technology or find it very hard to get to grips with it.

I come from a fairly traditional upbringing where my father went to work and my mother was a housewife, household duties were spilt along traditional lines of Mum cooking ,cleaning, sewing, and Dad doing DIY, fixing the car and digging the veg plot etc. Both of them are/were intelligent people.

My father died 5 years ago, and my Mother has had a hell of a learning curve. She just doesn't 'do' technology. It's been hard five years teaching her to use things like a hard drive recorder on the telly, using the internet and a computer. More recently we bought her a smart phone and after a year she's finally getting to grips with it, and loving it.
All of this teaching has involved showing her what to do, with her then writing it down long hand to use as a reference.
My Mrs had divorced parent who have remarried, and out of her four 'parents' two do technology, and two don't.

To use blanket statements about all old people embracing technology and finding it easy is frankly ridiculous. Many of them do, but many don't.

[XG332]

Should conseiser himself lucky.
We used to have payslips emailed to our work address.
That changed recently, it has been outsourced to another company. They require setting up an account to their site and logging in each time to see them.
The change happened 3 months ago, I cannot remember my password as it required a ludicrous combinations of letters, numbers and symbols

[R8Steve]

RyanOPlasty said:

Whilst it may be legal, there are potentially some significant security concerns.
I know there are a lot of people who don't care about this, but I like my personal information to be private and secure.

If sent by email, then there should be an appropriate level of encryption and you should be able to selkect your own credentials.
In my employer's initial system, payslips were sent as PDFs encrypted usin National Insurance numbers. Knowing this, they could be cracked within a few seconds on a recent PC.

Subsequently an on-line system was implemented. The data was still not adequately protected. I could choose my own password, but not only was it stored in plain text , it was converted to upper case and no special characters were allowed. you can check this by submitting a lost password request. This is far from best practice, if not downright negligent. ICO investigation in progress...

I'd say it's still a hell of a lot safer that sending it by post.

The issue is not that old people, for the majority of them anyway, cannot adapt to change. It's more that they don't want to.

Online security procedures are one of the biggest complaints in the service industry. Sometimes people forget what the alternative to these is.

[Flooble]

RyanOPlasty said:

Whilst it may be legal, there are potentially some significant security concerns.
I know there are a lot of people who don't care about this, but I like my personal information to be private and secure.

If sent by email, then there should be an appropriate level of encryption and you should be able to selkect your own credentials.
In my employer's initial system, payslips were sent as PDFs encrypted usin National Insurance numbers. Knowing this, they could be cracked within a few seconds on a recent PC.

Subsequently an on-line system was implemented. The data was still not adequately protected. I could choose my own password, but not only was it stored in plain text , it was converted to upper case and no special characters were allowed. you can check this by submitting a lost password request. This is far from best practice, if not downright negligent. ICO investigation in progress...

On the bright side, it sounds like a system I had to use once. Which was so badly written I discovered I could approve my own expenses by using the regular Chrome developer tools to change the value of the single letter status field which was wide open in the javascript

[creampuff]

Flooble said:

The key part of your response there being "In the world".

The UK has a 99% literacy rate.

It has an 84% Home Internet Access rate (http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/householdcharacteristics/homeinternetandsocialmediausage/bulletins/internetaccesshouseholdsandindividuals/2014-08-07)

The pool of people without access in the UK is rapidly decreasing. Looking at that chart, in about ten years you can expect the illiterate percentage to match the internet non-access percentage.

Well if we are going to take "universal" as only being literate people in the UK, why not my just say so ( I know it wasn't you who made the claim. But anyway the person who did make the claim doesn't even know you can submit a paper tax return). If we are just going to make up a definition of universal, we might as well say that internet use is universal in the UK population who use the internet. Duh.

OPs mate doesn't it seems use a computer at work, doesn't use one at home and manages just fine without one. Why should they have to use one now?

[creampuff]

R8Steve said:

I'd say it's still a hell of a lot safer that sending it by post.

The issue is not that old people, for the majority of them anyway, cannot adapt to change. It's more that they don't want to.

Online security procedures are one of the biggest complaints in the service industry. Sometimes people forget what the alternative to these is.

That or old people know they only have a certain time left and don't have a lot of money either, plus have the best part of a century figuring out how to get through life and like things which make their life easier. Not things which are a more complicated way of doing what they have been doing before.

So they don't like the idea of spending 400-fking-pounds on a computer, another 200-fking-pounds a year on a basic Internet connection and wasting time learning how to use the computer instead of doing something else like spending time with their grandkids, sleeping, playing bingo, gardening, watching tv or whatever. Just so they can read their fking payslip which they have been able to read just fine for the last 50 years by opening the envelope that it came in.

Edited by creampuff on Monday 29th August 21:46

[Vaud]

Or they can pop into their local library

[Rick101]

What job does the old boy do?

[R8Steve]

creampuff said:

R8Steve said:

I'd say it's still a hell of a lot safer that sending it by post.

The issue is not that old people, for the majority of them anyway, cannot adapt to change. It's more that they don't want to.

Online security procedures are one of the biggest complaints in the service industry. Sometimes people forget what the alternative to these is.

That or old people know they only have a certain time left and don't have a lot of money either, plus have the best part of a century figuring out how to get through life and like things which make their life easier. Not things which are a more complicated way of doing what they have been doing before.

So they don't like the idea of spending 400-fking-pounds on a computer, another 200-fking-pounds a year on a basic Internet connection and wasting time learning how to use the computer instead of doing something else like spending time with their grandkids, sleeping, playing bingo, gardening, watching tv or whatever. Just so they can read their fking payslip which they have been able to read just fine for the last 50 years by opening the envelope that it came in.

Because whether you like it or not things change, it's called progression. Without it they wouldn't be playing bingo or watching tv.

If everyone thought like that we would still be living in caves hunting for our dinner with a sharpened stick.

[V8LM]

May have been said above, but the legislation says a payslip must be given ( http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/part/I... ) and hence if the employee does not have normal access to a computer then it has not been given. The employee does not have to go out of their way to get it.

[creampuff]

R8Steve said:

Because whether you like it or not things change, it's called progression. Without it they wouldn't be playing bingo or watching tv.

If everyone thought like that we would still be living in caves hunting for our dinner with a sharpened stick.

Thats a rather poor analogy. A steel bladed knife is more useful than a sharpened rock. An emailed payslip is not more useful than a paper payslip.

[R8Steve]

creampuff said:

R8Steve said:

Because whether you like it or not things change, it's called progression. Without it they wouldn't be playing bingo or watching tv.

If everyone thought like that we would still be living in caves hunting for our dinner with a sharpened stick.

Thats a rather poor analogy. A steel bladed knife is more useful than a sharpened rock. An emailed payslip is not more useful than a paper payslip.

It would be a poor analogy if we still went hunting for our dinner, yes. Thanks to progression though we can now buy our dinner from shops though.

An e-mailed payslip is actually more useful to 99.9% of the population so rather than continue to cater for the .1% the industry has quite rightly went with the majority. This has been the case with most things throughout history and will continue to be the case forevermore i'd imagine.