Post
by
smr » Thu Jan 24, 2008 9:26 am
Hi Janot
FYI - I am a HR Director.
Your company cannot change contracts unilaterally. They must invoke a consultation process to do so or they are in breach of contract and you would have a successful claim against them for this. When consulting they must provide legitimate business justification for the changes.
If they do change them regardless you cannot be forced to sign a new contract and it will be up to the company to decide what action would follow in this case - DONT offer to resign.
After this ask to have an informal discussionwith your manager or your HR department and explain the situation to them - they may be understanding and the change may only apply to new employees coming into the company or employees subject to CCJ/BR/IVA after a certian date.
If you can't resolve this informally, you will need to obtain in writing from them what the changes will be, why the changes are being made, who they affect, when they a proposing to bring them in and what process they intend on following to obtain workforce agreement.
As you clearly do not agree with the proposed changes, you would need to raise a greivance in writing to your line manager - there is a set procedure they have to follow in dealing with this if they haven;t got one of their own. If you are not happy with the outcome of the greivance investigation/hearing you must appeal against the decision to the highest level of management. If after all of this you are still not satisfied you may have no alternative other than to resign - at this point your leaving will become constructive dismissal. The reason being is two-fold, firstly they have unilaterally changed your terms and conditions of work and secondly applied a terms that makes it impossible to carry out your normal duties, even though the change has no bearing on your capability to do your job.
I know this seems long winded, but if you don't go down this route and then end up taking your employer to tribunal, you will need to be able to demostrate that you tried to resolve this matter informally, then using the correct procedure but to no avail.
I really hope you can sort this out informally, this type of behaviour from some companies is all too common - not all, but some.
Hope this helps - post if you want to ask anymore questions
