UK Employee working for a US Team - redundancy following TUPE

bythepond

I note a similar current thread, but my situation is slightly different so thought would start a new thread.

Situation: worked for a US company for last 14.5 years but always through the UK office - a Ltd company. Our owners recently completed acquisition of our main competitor, also a US-based company with UK office, and merged both companies.

My role - as of yesterday - at risk of redundancy. My role reports into a manager in the US, and has done so for the last 3 years. I work within a team of 8 people and we all do the same role (supporting between 4 and 6 products for about 8 in total).

New Co in UK have similar roles in the UK supporting their legacy products - our products will be merging at some point in the future, but they are very similar as we have been direct competitors for the last 10 years!!

Questions:

1) I assume this falls within TUPE rules, even though our contracts have not yet been transferred.

2) Is there a risk / chance of unfair dismissal if the redundancy pool does not include the people who do the same job as me in my old co in the US as well as in the new co in the UK and US? My suspicion is that, as my role is "Senior" and based in the UK, they will claim it is a pool of one. My come back is that I do not report into the UK, but report through the US and work mainly with US colleagues and clients.

I am also trying to find useful resources around ETO as I am wondering if any claimed restructure could come under ETO reasoning and, therefore, not unfair. If anyone has any useful reference material, particularly as it relates to global companies that restructure their UK based employees - that would be enormously useful.

Thanks for reading and any help anyone can offer!

getmore4less

restructure is an ETO.

they do not need to pool you with the US if the restructure is we need less people at either of the UK offices.

if they did pool with the US do you have the right to work in the US and be prepared to relocate?