Can my employers do this to us?

[skyblue11]

So.....we were working in local government and got TUPEED over in April. After 6 months we are just settling in then get an email about 2 'job opportunities' put across as a development opportunity, in the wider part of the company i.e. the 'other side of the office'. Jobs which bear no resemblence to what we do in fact one post is menial boring admin. It was put our terms and conditions would remain the same. So we all thought thanks but no thanks as there is no incentive to move.

Then the day after at the team meeting we were told 2 of us had to do these posts, if no one applied people would be 'chosen'. This wasn't how it was put initially, why would we want to de skill ourselves and for no incentive? Also once you had gone to 'the other side' there is no coming back. Nothing has been put in writing yet, in fact I wasn't at team meeting nor were 6 others who are involved. Needless to say no one wants to do these roles....

Can they do this?

[FadBook]

They can make your role (not you) redundant if the role has diminished in some way. Even with the TUPE transfer, whilst a complex bit of employment law, restructures can happen and roles can diminish/become redundant.

They can then review "suitable alternative" roles, ones similar to your current role in pay, scale, responsibilities etc.

There is a clear process they should be following (simplistically, consulting on change, giving business case/commercial decision to proposed change, then acting on it i.e. notice of redundancy).

From the above, they sound like they're going about it in a bizarre way. Your best bet would be to visit ACAS website and read up on redundancy and consultation, and then take the information back to your boss about the process they should be doing. Ultimately, you need to find out if they are making redundancies, or just trying to 'push' people in to these vacancies before making redundancies, as they wouldn't be deemed as a suitable alternative. I would need far more detail to advise further.

[beals692]

What were your terms and conditions regarding changing roles before you TUPE'd out? I just say this because I work in local government and our contracts used to say that we had to be flexible in terms of work location (ie they could move our job to a different office). However, following the cuts etc, our terms and conditions were changed (following consultation with trade unions etc) so that we had to be flexible in terms of what job we do too (ie we also had to be prepared to move to a different job, according to business needs, and not just if our current role was being made redundant.) If you had similar terms and conditions prior to the transfer, presumably they would still stand.

[skyblue11]

Our terms and conditions of the TUPE were that we retained our jobs and it was all purely a 'lift and shift' operation. The way they are doing this is again underhand like all the other times we went through 'achieving change' under local government 3 years running so it was put to us this TUPE would mean that someone would actually invest in our service and funding wouldn't be an option. So far we haven't seen any of this, and worse people have left and no funding has been there to replace them, so it goes on, no one dare complain that the workload is unacceptable we struggle on stressed and micro managed, seems this is the way most companies now. I think it would actually be a relief to be made redundant things are so bad.