Using confidentiality to prevent consultation

DonDave72

Hi folks.
My employer made some staff redundant. When we went through the consultation, we were told how things would work. A few weeks after the new work patterns, my employer changed the work to include work that used to be carried out by another contractor on site.
I made a complaint that we were not told the truth and had no meaningful consultation. My employer has said that they were aware that the changes would happen very early on, but due to confidentiality between my employer, the other contractor and the client, they were not allowed to have a meaningful consultation.
As a result of my complaint, they have now decided to put us back on threat of redundancy and see if there is enough work for us without doing the work of the other contractor..
Can the 2 contractors get together with the client and use confidentiality to avoid a meaningful consultation and then simply lie and then impose changes?

unforeseen

The contractors do have a right to expect to their dealings with your employer and clients to be dealt with in a confidential manner which includes not informing their staff.

It sounds like, at the time, your employer's knew there would be changes but as the details hadn't been finalised they were not in a position to make them known.

Now, thanks to your complaint, they have brought the contractor back on board and probably looking for more redundancy as there is insufficient work because you won't cover the contractors work or are going to make a song and dance about it.

Foot, gun, bang

DonDave72

Hi

so what you are saying is if they want to lie during the consultation, they can lie? During the complaint, managers were aware that I was not asking for any changes, I was trying to find out why they lied and if there were going to be any other changes where staff would be told to do the work of another contractor (in this case we are cleaners and they are catering staff). I was also trying to find out why we were not told that we were being interviewed for 2 different jobs.

The other contractor is not taking on the extra work as they don't have the staffing levels and have no plans to take on extra staff.

DonDave72

Sorry, I meant to ask.
If they were not telling us due to things not being final, should they not have waited until they knew what was happening before carrying out the consultation? We had one member of staff withdraw from the consultation because she was not told that there was a light duty cleaning post available.

Undervalued

Providing they consult at the correct time as required by law and give you the correct information then I struggle to see that they are doing anything wrong. They will no doubt say, possibly quite correctly, that anything prior to that was just exploring ideas in an informal discussion.

As an aside, outsourcing a service to contractors and making directly employed staff redundant is quite common and perfectly lawful.