TUPE and Redundancy

[steve2910]

Hello All

 

Im hoping you guys can assist, we as a department are being royally screwed over

 

The company i am currently working for has decided to outsource the entire technical services group (50 staff from uk and 80 staff from America) to HP, in particular EDS.

 

They held a briefing on Tuesday and announced we would all be TUPE'd over to EDS on May 1st, 3 - 4 months later once the technical migrations have been completed they will be implementing phased redundancy's. They do not wish to keep any of the staff who my employeer wishes to TUPE over. Firstly, is this legal? Can i be TUPE'd over to EDS to simply then be made redundant once they have drained the knowledge out of us?

 

Secondly, my current employer has a enhanced redundancy package, EDS are stating they will not honour the enchanced policy and from May 1st we will put onto the EDS standard redundancy package, if this is done and im made redundant i stand to loose over 15k? Once again, can they do this?

 

Any advice you can offer, or links would be greatly appreciated.

 

Many Thanks

Steve

[Sidewinder]

Hi Steve

 

All I can say is that you need some specialist advice - Elche may be more enlightened than I, but in view of the amount of money at stake I would take as many opinions as are offered.

 

TUPE is meant to protect staff being transferred to a company taking over a business or 'undertaking' from any detriment to their existing T&Cs. On the face of it therefore you have a degree of protection - the new employer cannot simply make you redundant where the sole reason is the transfer, for example. The big 'but' is that there is an exception where the new employer can demonstrate that there are important Economical, Technical or Organisational (ETO) reasons for doing so. In a transfer such as yours, this would, I imagine, be fairly easy to prove (location, economy of scale and existing technical expertise making it unneccessary to increase the staffing levels for example). Any redundancy would therefore be potetially fair in those circumstances, however the biggest question is that of your existing contractual rights to enhanced redundancy and I do not see how they can simply disregard your contract. You may be able to look at a constructive dismissal action but it is likely to be a long road ahead.

[majik]

Hi

 

Strange question but your place of work wouldn't happen to be very close to a major championship football stadium would it ?

[steve2910]

Sidewinder, thanks very much for your reply, we are going to seek legal advice as a group, due to there being 30 of us.

 

It still urks me though that they can do this.

[jenny_adams]

It's so unfair what some companies get away with!

Edited March 2, 2009 by 42man
commercial link edited