Help please! TUPE and redundancy.

[FaFoutis]

If anyone has any advice on this I would be most grateful. My DH is effectively being made redundant without any redundancy pay thanks to a TUPE (I gather this stands for Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment). For his sake I'm pretending that I think all will be well but I'm actually very worried indeed.

He works for a big company who are outsourcing their IT to India. Almost everyone is being made redundant, with redundancy pay. A few English employees are being transferred to the Indian company under the TUPE law, with no choice in the matter. Pension slashed to almost nothing and into roles unsuited to skills. My DH is one of these (he has worked there for 15+ years) so unsurprisingly feels he needs to get out before the transfer - he has also had a taste of their management style which is not what he is used to. He's used to working independently as he's fairly high up.

The union are working on raising a grievance for him, but his line manager says this will 'burn his bridges'. It seems to me that the English company have a vested interest in transferring these few employees to the Indian company.

Sorry, I know it's long and boring. What we really need to do is get him out with some redundancy pay (or similar) so that he can start to look for contract work. How do we go about this? Should he do the grievance procedure? Has anyone else gone through this?

Aside from trying to be positive (we have 3dc and a mortgage so it isn't easy) I really don't know what advice to give him.

If he is being transferred under TUPE his terms and conditions remain unaltered. His pension rights up to the time of transfer are protected, so he won't lose anything he has already accrued. Unless there is a flexibility clause in his contract, changing his role without his consent may be a breach of contract. Even if there is a flexibility clause, any change must be reasonable.

He may have a claim for constructive dismissal if he resigns because his terms and conditions at the new employer are substantially worse than his current terms. He should consult a solicitor who specialises in employment law if he wants to go down this route. Constructive dismissal cases are not easy to win.

I'm afraid there is no way to force a redundancy payment. If he refuses to transfer it will be treated as him terminating his employment, so he will not be entitled to a redundancy payment.

Thanks prh, it looks like breach of contract. If constructive dismissal cases are difficult to win then I don't think it is worth trying. He is stressed to buggery as it is.