Job Outsourced - Redundancy Query
Discussion
DanL said:
Pulling out the bits and gluing them together:
139 Redundancy.
(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—
(b)the fact that the requirements of that business—
(ii)for employees to carry out work of a particular kind in the place where the employee was employed by the employer,
have ceased or diminished or are expected to cease or diminish.
So - it's a redundancy situation because the work the employee was doing is no longer going to be carried out at the employee's location.
"Role" is HR speak for a job in my experience. So, you have three people doing the same job / role - that of a buyer, say. You may find that for one reason or another you either only need one buyer role now, or you still need three but the needs of the business mean the office these buyer roles are associated with changes.
Making the role rather than the person redundant means just that - you can't say at the start "John and Fred are being made redundant as we only need one buyer now. Peter, that's going to be you." Instead you say "We're losing two buyer roles, and John, Fred and Peter are all at risk of losing their jobs as they all work in the impacted area.". Then HR and management do a bit of scoring based on John, Fred and Peter's performance, experience, etc. and work out in an unbiased way who out of the three people they wish to retain for the one remaining buyer role. That may be Peter still, but they've got to show it was fair.
That's all by the by in this instance - instead they've said that the UK based roles will be done in the Indian office starting from date X, and as a result the UK based roles are redundant.
Thank you for the clarification.139 Redundancy.
(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—
(b)the fact that the requirements of that business—
(ii)for employees to carry out work of a particular kind in the place where the employee was employed by the employer,
have ceased or diminished or are expected to cease or diminish.
So - it's a redundancy situation because the work the employee was doing is no longer going to be carried out at the employee's location.
"Role" is HR speak for a job in my experience. So, you have three people doing the same job / role - that of a buyer, say. You may find that for one reason or another you either only need one buyer role now, or you still need three but the needs of the business mean the office these buyer roles are associated with changes.
Making the role rather than the person redundant means just that - you can't say at the start "John and Fred are being made redundant as we only need one buyer now. Peter, that's going to be you." Instead you say "We're losing two buyer roles, and John, Fred and Peter are all at risk of losing their jobs as they all work in the impacted area.". Then HR and management do a bit of scoring based on John, Fred and Peter's performance, experience, etc. and work out in an unbiased way who out of the three people they wish to retain for the one remaining buyer role. That may be Peter still, but they've got to show it was fair.
That's all by the by in this instance - instead they've said that the UK based roles will be done in the Indian office starting from date X, and as a result the UK based roles are redundant.
lenny007 said:
CAPP0 said:
Had a not-dissimilar situation personally, about a year ago. Huge multi-national corporation, the bi-annual restructure resulted in a new man at the top of our particular tree, who decreed that he wanted all his team to be resident in mainland Europe (although last time I checked, the UK, where I live, was of course in Europe, albeit the other side of a small stream). After a little jiggery-pokery on team structure, I was interviewed for a role which encompassed my then-current position, but having advised that whilst I was happy to travel around Europe (as I had been doing, in the same role, for about 6 years), I wasn't about to move to the fatherland, I was offered a settlement agreement. On the upside, I have another job now in which I am approximately 1000 times more content, and that's despite a 40% drop in overall package (if the new place could up that, I'd be nearly 2000 times happier 
). The moral is, sure it's scary being lobbed out, but good things can and often do come of it.
To be honest, you've hit the nail on the head there. I reminded my wife earlier that last year she wasn't sleeping due to worrying about having to go to work (stress, management stupidity, class of personalities, that sort of thing) to now not sleeping because she might not be going! ). The moral is, sure it's scary being lobbed out, but good things can and often do come of it.She's been in a meeting this morning so we'll see soon enough what the situation is and how soon she needs to get her CV out!
lenny007 said:
Incidentally, the company are sending over representatives next week to actually find out what my wife and her team do, before realising they have no idea of how to do it.
This is not a comment based on sour grapes - more based on the recent outsourcing of another team in the company which took place in last autumn and which was so successful, the team in the UK has been partially reassembled / taken out of the relocated roles in order to fix the mess caused in the last 4 months.
OP - my experience of such outsourcing is that the Indians will promise the earth without even knowing what they are required to do, for that is their cultural approach. I was told my IT job was being outsourced 5 years ago. 5 years in they are not capable of doing the job properly. Anything that is repeatable, that can be done from a script, they are fine. Anything that requires a modicum of initiative never happens - the tiniest of decisons have to get passed up the chain until a boss somewhere says yes or no. Arguably said boss won't know the area in sufficient technical detail so make poorly considered decisions, but at least they make a decision. This is not a comment based on sour grapes - more based on the recent outsourcing of another team in the company which took place in last autumn and which was so successful, the team in the UK has been partially reassembled / taken out of the relocated roles in order to fix the mess caused in the last 4 months.
If I were your wife I would take the approach of not volunteering any information whatsoever, only answer specific questions, and always ask, "do you understand?". Said Indian representives, in my considerable experience, find it impossible to say "No" to that question, lest they commit their least favoured thing: admitting that they don't know something. She then swans out of the place having done "Knowledge Transfer" but hasn't really told them anything. Then it all goes FUBAR but she is long gone.
Probably not what you want to hear, but it is very difficult to fight against this kind of thing. Somebody on high will have been bonused to 'make it happen'. Just tell her not to make it easy for them.
Just thought i'd offer an update on the situation as it stands.
My wife and her colleagues had a meeting with their department manager yesterday to discuss the itinerary for the forthcoming visit from their Indian colleague and a typed up copy of this was presented to them.
This matched, word for word, the advertisement for the job.
When pressed, the manager said that as far as she was told, it was to discuss some minor transfer of functions to India. When presented with the job advert and description, i'm told her reaction was rather stunned - she genuinely didn't know what to say or that it had been going on.
Further to this, she was later heard to say "a storm is brewing" to the site manager and i believe it is escalating from here.
To PurpleTurtle - she's already adopting that approach. Other departments who are desperate to keep their jobs, spilled the beans on everything and it did them no good. In another instance, representatives from India video'd the staff describing what they did and put a keystroke logger on the terminal used to demonstrate how they worked and what they did.
Needless to say, my wife is refusing to engage in that sort of shenanigans and will be strictly "Yes/No" when asked.
My wife and her colleagues had a meeting with their department manager yesterday to discuss the itinerary for the forthcoming visit from their Indian colleague and a typed up copy of this was presented to them.
This matched, word for word, the advertisement for the job.
When pressed, the manager said that as far as she was told, it was to discuss some minor transfer of functions to India. When presented with the job advert and description, i'm told her reaction was rather stunned - she genuinely didn't know what to say or that it had been going on.
Further to this, she was later heard to say "a storm is brewing" to the site manager and i believe it is escalating from here.
To PurpleTurtle - she's already adopting that approach. Other departments who are desperate to keep their jobs, spilled the beans on everything and it did them no good. In another instance, representatives from India video'd the staff describing what they did and put a keystroke logger on the terminal used to demonstrate how they worked and what they did.
Needless to say, my wife is refusing to engage in that sort of shenanigans and will be strictly "Yes/No" when asked.
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