Afternoon all. The mrs works for a big multinational who are fragmenting and basically outsourcing pretty much everything to cut down on staff. The mrs and her co-workers have been offered replacement jobs at different offices but they are 50-60-70 miles away and not really practical. The company's attitude is take-it-or-leave-it.
How far can a business go in terms of making your job untenable? The mrs has worked there for a while and would happily take redundancy but it seems the company just wants people to 'go'.
Someone will be along who knows what they are talking about but I suspect that would be deemed unreasonable and the company should offer redundancy.
talk to an employment lawyer - this might be seen as constructive dismissal but you need someone who knows both the law and the full details of her personal situation (includign havign access to company handbooks/contracts etc which may cover exactly this sort of situation).
I'm on call for TJ today so ...........
speak to your union rep
Depends on her original contract, if there is a clause that covers the employee to be flexible to moving with the premises/workload/business trends then they are within reason, although I suspect not. I don't think it's as clear cut as constructive dismissal either, a difficult one I'd say.
It may be the case they are hoping for natural wastage and by hanging in a bit longer she may get the redundancy notice. One way to bring that forward would be for her to formally ask the company for travelling costs on the grounds that the company never give her reasonable notice that they would change her working conditions. They'll either cough up a pay rise (if they value her) or a redundancy notice may appear, which in itself is wrong but it pushes the balance a bit nearer to constructive dismissal/untenable.
Normally companies would issue redundancy notices and offer the move as an alternative
How far are the new offices from the old ones? 50-60-70 is obviously a ref to how far they are from peoples houses