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Other than the various financial scandals and horrors in the stock markets it's been a pretty quiet week, so today we've got a mostly public service post for you.

First of all we have the annual minimum wage change, a minor change this year from £5.52 per hour to £5.73 per hour for anyone aged 22 and over. As a result holiday pay will also be increasing from £0.56 per hour to £0.58 per hour again for anyone 22 or over. For most of you I realise this is almost non-news (the impact on your weekly wage will be on average just pence), but it's something we get questions about each year.

The only really interesting thing (okay it's not that interesting but it's more interesting than the last paragraph), is that apparently despite the minimum wage changing each year in October around a third of small businesses are "not fully aware" of the increase leaving them open to fines of up to £5,000 (all those stats are care of Bibby Financial).

It's probably also worth mentioning at this point that when negotiating a contract, a rate increase of about 5% each year should keep you above the rate of inflation. Those of you in IT may also want to take a look at ITJobswatch which tracks the the averages of all sorts of IT jobs. If you have any other contract negotiation tips email them in and I'll try to post them here.

The final two public service announcements are from customer services; the first is a request for you to keep your email updated as over the next couple of weeks we will be sending out information about the new services, and for speeds (and the environments) sake we'd like to send some of it by email where possible. The second was another request, this time for those of you that have received a text from us about the Agency Regulations opt out, to get in touch as we need to change your choice on our system before October 13th.

Well that's it for this week, next week you can expect a lot of talk about our new services and other more exciting things. Hope you all have a great weekend.

Hugo
03/10/2008