Where side hustles create legal risk for employers<\/p>\n
The rise in poly-employment is prompting employers to look more closely at where a side hustle stops being harmless and starts being a liability. Joel Hayden, practice group leader in the employment team at commercial law firm LegalVision, said the real exposure begins when an employee draws on the employer’s own resources to build their outside venture.<\/p>\n
“If an employee uses customer lists, pricing, supplier details, product designs, templates, confidential know-how, software, equipment or paid working time for their own business, the employer may have claims for breach of contract, breach of confidence, misuse of intellectual property or breach of duties owed during employment,” Hayden said.<\/p>\n
He added that the line between a hobby and a business matters legally: a side hustle is more likely to be a business “where the person is actively seeking profit, taking regular bookings, advertising, invoicing, using an ABN, selling products or building a customer base.”<\/p>\n
Hayden said outright bans on outside work are hard to defend for most roles. “Employees are generally free to use their own time as they choose, but that freedom is not unlimited,” he said, noting that employers have a stronger basis to intervene when a side hustle “targets the same customers, uses the same suppliers” or “relies on confidential information” \u2013 a risk he said is most acute in a Fair Work Commission case<\/a> where a senior employee was dismissed over a confidentiality breach-style scenario, and in “sales, recruitment, technology, professional services, creative, consulting and client-facing” industries.<\/p>\n Building a side hustle policy that will hold up<\/p>\n Rather than a blanket ban, Hayden recommends “rules requiring disclosure or approval for work that competes with the business, affects performance or creates a safety risk,” paired with a policy that “should explain the business reason, not simply assert control over private time.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Where side hustles create legal risk for employers The rise in poly-employment is prompting employers to look more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":843808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[6544,28,20041,134,209853],"class_list":["post-843807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jobs","tag-abs","tag-business","tag-deputy","tag-jobs","tag-side-hustles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}