Comments (0) I’m fond of cartoons, with Alex from the Daily Telegraph being my favourite. Banx in the FT is usually very droll as well. Steve Bell in The Guardian always used to be good but I don’t read The Grauniad anymore.
Financial Times 8th June 2010
I saw this in the FT yesterday. Could be very topical after the Budget.
Financial Times 9th June 2010
And from today’s paper – very true indeed.
Redundancy hasn’t been in the general news recently, although Eversheds, the national law firm did hit the headlines when it was successfully sued by a male employee it selected and made redundant. He alleged that he had been the victim of sex discrimination because he was not scored as well as a female colleague, in the same selection pool, who was on maternity leave at the time. She was scored more favourably because the firm feared doing anything else would have exposed them to a claim for sex discrimination from her. Eversheds are appealing the decision.
Ok, imagine the scenario. You’re told on Friday morning at 9.35 a.m to go to the 7th floor and meet Siobhan, your HR generalist. Only HR live on the 7th floor, not real people. You go into a meeting room with her and there is Charles, your line manager or maybe Fiona, who is really quite senior in HR but not usually seen during the hours of daylight. You’re handed a lengthy letter and told that your role is at risk of redundancy. What do you do?
Answer: try and get as much information out of Siobhan and Charles/Fiona as you can. What to ask?
BA has been in the news … again and, as usual, for all the wrong reasons. The company formerly claiming to be the world’s favourite airline has now asked 40,000 of its staff to not just take a pay cut but to work for nothing for a month to ensure the company’s survival. Now there’s an enticing offer … not.
I posted on this subject a while ago and it has received such a lot of visits I thought I better give my public more of what they want. It also gives me an opportunity to provide an update on the poll I set up below on this issue. At the moment 57% of respondents would elect a pay cut and 31% would take redundancy. The remaining 11% didn’t know. Whether those results will change after this post wil be interesting to see.
Apart from the post below I haven’t touched upon these regulations, mainly because they are not the most interesting regulations in the world to read. However, I have been spurred on by posting on the case of Royden & others v Barnetts (see below) and TUPE comes up quite a few times on the search engines as a keyword. In future posts I will look at the TUPE issues on the insolvency of the employer as well as the consultation obligations imposed upon employers by TUPE.
So, what do the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE) actually do?
For T.S Eliot, April was the cruellest month. For employment lawyers it can be the busiest because of the plethora of new legislation and statutory instruments being introduced. This year is no different and today sees The Employment Act 2008 come into force, replacing the discredited Employment Act 2002 (Dispute Resolution) Regulations 2004. In The Wasteland, TS Eliot wrote “what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”. Admittedly Eliot was talking about the human condition and the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of modern society, rather than the 2004 regulations, but there is even so great resonance in those words for employment lawyers. Few people have had anything good to say about the rules and today they are abolished, replaced by a set of rules that are much less rigid but will give rise to other problems in the future.
If there was any doubt that it was then it has been dispelled by a London Employment Tribunal recently. The facts are interesting enough, but the point of law raised is potentially massive and may cause to happen what Judges fear more than anything else: the floodgates opening! Cue Biblical style disaster, get building the ark now! (Judges and lawyers always worry about “the floodgates” opening when there is a new development in law – it might mean a deluge of cases swamping the courts).
This is often a live issue in redundancy situations. At the moment, with the number of redundancies rocketing skywards, it is a question that is being put to me time and again. Quite often the employer’s rationale for placing a person “at risk” of redundancy can look shaky.
The definition of redundancy is found at s.139 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. It is defined thus;
(1) For the purposes of this Act an employee who is dismissed shall be taken to be dismissed by reason of redundancy if the dismissal is wholly or mainly attributable to—
I’ve been running a poll on the above topic since my post on the 27th February. Two weeks on and the results seem remarkably balanced – 38% in favour of a redundancy package and 38% in favour of a pay cut, with 23% undecided. I was expecting the clear winner to be the pay cut, given the difficulty in getting a new job at the moment. I’ll keep the poll running and see if the result changes over time.
Thanks to all those who took part.
I am a Partner in Dale Langley & Co of 60 Lombard Street London EC3V 9EA. Please call me if you would like advice on any issues relating to employment law or litigation. I only give legal advice on specific matters through the firm, not this blog
I also write a blog on legal services deregulation called "There may be Trouble Ahead" - see link below
The Guardian
