Being treated terribly at work - any help or advice please.

[SummerPeach]

I feel that I am being treated unfairly at work - and maybe my employer is even potentially breaking the law.
Any help / advice / legal info greatly appreciated.
I will try to keep this as concise as possible……. Thank you for taking time to read / reply……..

My contract is full time - permanent - worked for this employer since 2014.

Returned to work in June 2023 having had a year of maternity leave.

I was back in work for just 9 days and then told my post (and my entire team) was being deleted from the new structure (whole department restructure. Our team affected the most by literal deletion!). This was announced to us in a meeting and we were all totally blind sighted and it was out of the blue.

To add to this - we are told our pay is going DOWN a paygrade!

My current pay is protected for a year (until September 2024 when it’ll go down).

As a team, we tried to challenge the proposal to delete us.
We showed a united front and made it clear that we disagreed with what they had put forward to us.
None of our questions were answered thoroughly. None of us agreed with any of it. Felt completely disregarded, downgraded, took it personally, felt humiliated, felt let down, felt useless and worthless. Nothing was put in place to ensure we still felt valued as employees.

Fast forward 3 months of a hellish, stressful process! Here we are in our new roles.
I have not signed agreement or had sight of a new issued contract.
My contract DOES have a wording clause to suggest that my contract can be changed IF the unions (plural!) are in agreement.
I have not seen evidence of this!
(I am not a member of the union and have only heard negative things so won’t be wasting money to join.)

The new team and role I have been moved to has caused me so much stress, that the Dr signed me off. I am not coping with the situation which has been forced on me against my will!
The new job is awful and really stressful and not what I signed up to.
I put in a plea with HR to be moved elsewhere, but they state the SAE (suitable alternative employment) criteria needs have been met as far as they are concerned, so I better like it or quit basically!

At the end of the day I have a mortgage and kids to look after. So quitting isn’t an option. But working in this environment isn’t doable for me.

Any help greatly received. I’ve probably left stuff out by mistake, it’s all been very complicated. It doesn’t feel fair at all !!

Wow! That sounds horrendous. So sorry you are having all this stress, maybe contact Acas for advice.

https://www.acas.org.uk/

At the end of the day, they are allowed to delete your posts, but you should have been offered the option of redundancy alongside redeployment to a lower grade. Was this not offered as an option?

I'm going through a very similar situation OP. We were the last to know and are now expected to collude with the narrative about how shit our team is, while at the same time handing over knowledge to other people that still don't know what we do.

I'm in the public sector, 2nd restructure for me, although worse than the last. It's been in the pipeline for a long time. I've been hearing the plans from colleagues in other teams since long before the restructure. They had it in for our manager (who was a great manager) and she is gone. The big boss has her kids and friends of her kids and friends of friends popping in and on salaries.

I don'tthink there is anythingto be gained from fighting it. Just smile and nod until you can muster the the motivation to update your CV.

The thing is, redundancy is never easy and the people being made redundant will rarely think it's fair. But sometimes, they may not have access to the bigger picture that management has, and they may not see things from the same perspective.

I have been on both sides of the table. It's upsetting to be told that your post is going to be deleted, but the thing to understand is that it (usually!) isn't personal. It isn't a value judgement on how hard you or your teammates worked. It's simply an acknowledgement that the needs of the business have changed.

As I said, you should have been offered a choice between redundancy and the redeployment to a lower paid post. If you were offered those options and chose the latter, I think you have the right to a kind of cooling off/trial period, at the end of which you can still opt for redundancy if it isn't working out. 4 weeks from memory?

If you're still within that period, maybe opting for the redundancy and looking for another job might be your best option? You'd have the redundancy pay to tide you over in the meantime?

As far as I know there is not the option for the employee to choose redeployment or redundancy in these circumstances. They have redeployed you to a job with a lower pay grade; however your higher pay has been protected for a year. From my understanding having gone through a similar situation, this is completely legal. Only if you could not be redeployed to a suitable alternative role would you have been eligible for redundancy.

Further to my previous post, I believe you can refuse the new redeployment role you are offered, ut it has to be for good reason. Wanting redundancy instead is not sufficient. If it is considered you are turning down a suitable role without good reason you will not be entitled to redundancy pay. (And of course your employer will be strongly pushing to redeploy you rather than give you a pay out so they are likely to be strongly challenging any reasons you give to refuse a suitable role.)

Ah, you may be right. I'm not sure with the protected salary. I had assumed that, if the pay is going down at the end of the year, then redundancy would still apply but perhaps not.

Presumably you can still argue that the alternative employment is unsuitable though, within the trial period, if you have reasonable grounds for doing so? (Which the OP may or may not have...did the original contract specify the location of the work?)

X post!

Only option in that case might be to update your cv and start looking for something else, then OP.

It's hard to be forced into that position when you've been with one employer for a long time, but sometimes it can lead to new and more exciting opportunities than you might have otherwise imagined...it did for me, and I'm grateful for it now, even though I was gutted at the time!

Thank you :)
I’ll look at this.

Redundancy was not offered, which I think is disgusting seeing how long some people in my team have been working there!

Sounds awful Velvian. :(
I understand exactly how you feel.
it’s not fair at all is it.
I will keep job hunting but there really doesn’t seem to be many jobs right now.

If only redundancy had been an option, we would have all jumped at it.

Yeah that makes sense, it’s just the fact that I’ve only just returned from maternity leave in June.
And our post was deleted yet no new contract issued and no redundancy offered.

I work in retail and have been through quite a few consultations. In retail, it is common practice to restructure and right-size the organisation frequently, therefore they tend to be pretty slick and follow the legal process, even though it may not feel fair.

There are legal requirements that have to be adhered to. The acas link above is a good place to start.

It would be good to know how big your company is, how many employees it has and how many employees the restructure has affected. I think there are different requirement depending on the scale of change. The ACAS website should be able to help.