Redundancy Law Solicitors for Employees
The first thing to understand is that, if your employer makes you redundant, it’s a dismissal. So, if you have a year’s service, you could claim unfair dismissal. But, you can only make that claim when the dismissal has taken place. Then, you have three months to get the claim in.
Our expert Manchester employment solicitors can give you advice about what to look out for in a redundancy or restructuring process and we’re familiar with the deadlines and how to calculate them.
An employer must always consult in any redundancy situation. Firstly, they should look at possible alternatives to redundancy. Our experienced specialist employment solicitors can advise you on whether there has been adequate consultation. Your employer should consider any suggestion you or your colleagues come up with, but they don’t have to accept it. If they don’t even consider it, any dismissal may well be unfair. An employer does not have to ask for volunteers. It’s up to them.
Then, if they are considering making 20 or more people redundant, the employer needs to consult your representatives. That’s called “collective consultation” and it can get particularly tricky because the rules and regulations are complex. If they fail to follow them, you and your colleagues may be entitled to 90 days pay each. That’s separate to any claim for unfair dismissal. The experienced, specialist, employment solicitors at Carter Moore can advise you on whether your employer has followed the correct procedure or not.
An employer should always consult each individual it’s considering making redundant. A failure of individual consultation will render each dismissal unfair.
Our experienced employment lawyers will be able to advise you whether your employer has done enough in respect of consultation.
Your employer must establish a fair selection process which is as objective as possible. The problem for your employer is that some of the obvious, apparently objective, criteria might well be discriminatory on grounds of age and/or sex. The specialist employment solicitors at Carter Moore have extensive experience of advising on selection in redundancy cases.
Often the key question in a claim for unfair dismissal when someone has been made redundant is “Why me? Why did you select me?” The experienced employment law solicitors at Carter Moore can quickly and easily give you a straightforward, honest, view of whether a Tribunal is likely to accept that the selection process was fair.
Finally, an employer should always consider alternative employment. They should never assume that you won’t be interested, even if the alternative pays much less and/ or is a long way away. If they didn’t ask you and give you the opportunity to apply, the dismissal may well be unfair.
Bear in mind, though, that, if redundancy was inevitable, no matter what, you may have a good claim for unfair dismissal but find that it’s not worth anything. Our specialist employment solicitors have long experience of assessing the fairness of redundancy dismissals and the strength and likely value of unfair dismissal claims. We use that experience to decide whether it’s worth pursuing your claim and we can give you a decision on whether we’ll deal with it on a “no win, no fee basis” quickly and easily, but only when we have heard full details.
