Employer restructuring and no longer wants part-time staff - is this legal?

[MyDogHasFleas]

Hello,

The organisation I work for has just announced a major restructure which will result in a number of redundancies. All the existing part-time roles will go, all the jobs in the new structure are full-time, and they have announced that their "preference" is for full-time staff (ie not job share etc).

Does anyone know whether they can do this with impunity, or whether it is in breach of their commitment to equality, given that so many women have to work part-time because of family commitments?

I found this on directgov, which talks about protection for part-time workers. I have also talked to the Union Area Officer, but he wasn't entirely helpful beyond suggesting that perhaps I could find "someone else who wants to stay at home with the youngsters " and propose a job share together. But that doesn't address the issue of them having a preference for full-time workers. Surely this constitutes "less favourable treatment"?

Any opinions very gratefully received.

bump

In my sector we would have to carry out an equality impact assessment of this policy. If I were doing it, I would conclude that there is a possibility of indirect discrimination on grounds of sex, age and/or disability from the removal of all part-time posts. It would therefore be up to me to explain the business case for doing so.

The sector I work in (higher education) is covered by the public sector equality duty (see ACAS guidance) and we are expected to have equality impact assessments for all policies and strategies. In practice we focus on having these for major changes and major policies. (The most tricky ones for me are to do with disability where we are required to make proactive reasonable adjustments for ALL disabilities, even if none of our students currently has that disability.) Removing all part-time jobs would certainly need a very strong business case. At my university we have a policy of allowing everyone to request flexible working so I doubt this situation would arise.

If there are legitimate business grounds then the change might be permissible - e.g. I can insist office staff collectively need to cover 9-5 if I can show that those are the times when students expect us to be open, and being fair to all staff might mean that everyone needs to be willing to cover at least one shift per week to 5pm.

I'm not clear on which sectors have to provide equality impact assessments - there was a challenge to the government's budget on the grounds that they hadn't carried out one, surely public sector if anything is! However the challenge was deemed "unarguable", whatever that means.

It might be worth looking through the Home Office's guidance to see if you can work out the position for your sector.

Sorry, wrong link: Home Office guidance

Thanks so much, Scatterplot. It is a Further/Adult Education College.

I am planning to see HR next week to get some clarification on this, and I will ask them whether they have carried out an equality impact assessment.

Can employees request details of the assessment?

You can probably make a FoI request: see Freedom of Information advice on direct.gov.

If you do, keep it very specific, since FoI requests can be refused if it would take too long to put together the information or would cost them too much.

Sounds extreme,y dubious to me, and from the way you have described it sounds like unlawful discrimination. I would call your union HQ. your company ought to be consulting with union reps if there are more than 20 people at risk of redundancy, and this is what you pay your subs for.

Thanks again scatterplot - will look at that.

Thanks, Hermione, yes that's what I thought. I'm not sure whether consulted would be the right word (but then again I'm quickly learning that the word consultation has very little meaning in this sort of situation...) but they certainly informed the Union. Hopefully our rep is looking into this, but because it is a big restructure there are lots of issues involved, and I'm not getting the sense that there's much will there to do much for the part-timers unfortunately. The Union Area Officer who came to advise us was sniffy about it to say the least. When I pointed him to the info on protection for part-timers from directgov, his immediate response was "well you can find all sorts of things on the internet".

Anyway I will chase up the Union Rep - it's great to have a better idea of the specific questions I need to ask, thank you.

not the same thing but related, i am currently looking to employ 3 staff on top of my current "resources" I bloody hate that term!
2 clinical wte, 1 admin wte, I actually could employ more, but every time I sit down and work out the sums part timers come up trumps if they can be flexible workers, as in if you are a working Mum/Dad of School agers, you will want school holidays off as much as possible, most schools do great wrap round care in my area, but one of my current staff is a lady who is part time but takes her hoildays out side of school hours.
sooo, if I could find someone who would work full time during the school time they would be covered during the school hoildays full time with loads of cross over of the two at our busy times with are term time.
this would cover say 1 to 1 1/2 wte, the excess time could be another person who wants odd hours, say a semi retired person or working Mum or Dad, who wants 10 til 2 which are our core busy hours.
Admin wise I really would like a whole timer to match the lady I have, but it is not a deal breaker, but I would want 2 1/2 days off each and hand over which would reduce the 1/2 day for me by say 1/2 hour (not them).

I actually think P/t rock, the rub is, you all take a lot of thinking time, so it is the cowards way out to insist on full timers,
even writing this, I have been rethinking my plan, and thinking good god it would be better to get full time staff....but bang for buck part timers are better if I can get the math right.

yours previous part time worker X

Can i ask if this ever got resolved as i now have the same situation coming up in my school?