Redundancy, Know Your Rights To Consultation.
Posted: Sunday, August 03, 2008
by Meera Yagnik
Temple Court Chambers
Most firms having been hit by the sub prime crisis are looking at saving costs and the biggest way to reduce costs are by shifting labour, here is a guide to your rights if you are made redundant.
What is Redundancy?
A process that firms by law have to follow if they are thinking of shutting the business down, reorganising the business or restructuring or simply cannot afford to keep an employee on as the work he or she is doing has ceased or diminished. Redundancy is to compensate a long serving employee for the loss of a right he/she has in a job. To qualify for a redundancy payment you need to have at least 2 years continuous service as an employee.
First there needs to be proper consultation with the employee as to the reason for redundancy, alternatives and any other options available, taking into account what the employee has asked the employer to consider. Consultation should be no more than 30 days before the redundancy takes place. If more than 20 employees then the consultation process starts 90 days before the redundancy. The union representatives would be consulted on the employee's behalf in this scenario. However, there needs to be a formal dismissal meeting with the employee before the final notice of redundancy is sent out. Failure to adhere to this guideline can result in a claim for automatic unfair dismissal.
In order for the consultation procedure to be fair and genuine, what this means is that the employees should be given to the affected employees to express their views ( Rowell v Hubbard Group Services)
Further an objective and fair selection criteria needs to be adopted when it comes to selecting employees for redundancies. The tribunal will be entitled to know, who made the decision to select, what information was taken into account and on what criteria the information was assessed (Bristol Channel Ship Repairers Ltd v O'Keefe).
It would be wrong to select women for redundancy because she is pregnant, or on maternity leave, unless objective selection criteria had been used and the selection based upon this a lone (Brown v Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council)
Further a employee on long term sick cannot be made redundant a s a result of their long term absence from work, but again can do so if based upon the usual objective and fair selection criteria (Hill v General Accident & Fire Assurance Corp plc)
The Employment Rights Act 1996 s 105 sets out some of the automatically unfair reasons for redundancy selection such as trade union membership, maternity/paternity leave, time off for dependents and the Fixed Term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment Legislation).
In short if you have been made redundant with little or no consultation you may have a claim for unfair dismissal, also, if you feel you have been unfairly selected for redundancy due to the assertion of your employment law rights you also may have a claim for unfair dismissal. You should seek advice from ACAS and perhaps lodge a claim at the Employment Tribunal; you have six months since the date of the redundancy decision to lodge such an action.
Meera Yagnik
Barrister
Temple Court Chambers
COPYRIGHT
This Article has been viewed 1,280 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.