Any advice on this situation?

cubegame

Morning all.

I wonder if anyone could offer advice on this situation which my brother in law is in.

He works in a local government job and his area is being restructured from a department with a large brief to three with narrower, more specific functions.

At present he holds the job title of Principal Project Manager. He is one of 15 with the same job title. Since he started his job four years ago he has worked pretty much exclusively on one type of project (probably 90% plus). There are other Principal Project Managers who work in this area as well but their involvement is much lower (perhaps 10% max of their work hours).

Due to the number of redundancies there has been a collective consultation and this has now completed and he has had a letter stating his job is being made redundant so he is "at risk".

Now of the 15 people who are current Principal Project Managers, they have created 9 new jobs which are split into 3 groups over the new departments. Thus, 6 people are being made redundant.

However, the confusion comes over the job mapping which the council has applied. During consultation they established a principle whereby any employee who's current role is 80% or above equivalent to a new role will map across to that role.

Two of the new roles are unambiguously the same as his current role. Therefore he is very confused over why he hasn't mapped to the new role but instead been placed at risk.

The message that HR have alluded to is that they could not consider the specifics of project work type in the mapping but only duties. Does this sound fair?

TBagpuss

The employer can generally determine what criteria they use and how they define them, as long as they don't choose things which are discrininatory in relation to protected characteristics.

So it's probably fair in that it meets the requirement for a fairprocess, even though there may be other, equally fair ways of doing it which might have had a different outcome for your BIL.