Redundancy and Settlement Agreements

[Womby]

Hi

I am being made redundant and my employer as done the necessary meeting with me and I have had various letters. My notice period started last week and my notice (from them) is 12 weeks.

My employer has made it clear that I will have to work my full notice to receive my pay for that time (i.e. they won't entertain 'paying me off' early) - I will receive my actual redundancy payment at the end of the 12 weeks.

In addition they have advised that I have to take any outstanding holiday and they won't allow me to take it in cash at the end of my employment (I am quite upset about this as I will need every penny).

I found out today that many of the other people being made redundant alongside me are being offered 'Settlement' agreements meaning they can leave early as long as they sign an confidentiality agreement and there will be an extra payment as a sweetener.

I should point at that the employees being offered this are all managers and I'm a lowly admin person.

What I need to know is can my employer do this? Can they make me slog through my notice period whilst letting others go early on preferential terms to me? It's very hard being there at the moment as the atmosphere is terrible but thinking that there is injustice in the way things are being handled is eating me up and making things even harder.

I intend to ask the question of HR as soon as I can but want to be as prepared as I can be on what is right and, not right, in law.

There is no obligation for employers to treat managers and admin staff the same. There will be a commercial reason why they are doing that with other staff, and that reason doesn't apply to you.

I'm afraid they can and will treat you differently, it maybe written into their contracts.

My dh was a manager and was made to work every minute of the notice period - towards the end he was very demotivated and it absolutely sucked.

However, check whether you can take free time off to attend interviews, print off cv's, take agency calls in office hours, have a letter of personal recommendation? Some employers are prepared to be very flexible and end on a high note!