Can my employer enforce short-time working & pay off 80%?

D166ERS

I work for a university who are likely to require all employees to short-time work (e.g. work 80% of hours for 80% pay) for the next year due to reduced income due to COVID-19. They have not furloughed any academic staff. Can they enforce this and what rights do employees have to refuse? How will this affect pensions and Annual Leave entitlements? They expect all teaching activity to be fulfilled. 

Jeremy535897

The university will have to agree any revised contract terms with its employees through the normal process. That will cover issues such as annual leave and pension entitlement. Those who do not accept the new terms will have to be let go, because you couldn't have a two tier system. Then the contractual and statutory terms will come into play.

There is guidance on GOV.UK. See for example:
https://www.gov.uk/staff-redundant/layoffs-and-shorttime-working

sharpe106

If you agree you leave entitlement will be at the new amount and most likely pensions will be, you could probably try to negotiate pension contributions though if you want to carry on paying the same amount as you do now. 

D166ERS

They are talking about applying this to employees above a particular pay grade, so it would effectively be a two-tier system. On the gov.uk pages, it refers to short-time working as being less than 50% time/pay so I’m not sure it applies here. If employees refuse to work short-time, they’d have to be made redundant?  I don’t think there would be any enhanced redundancies either, as this is to save money in the short-term. 

Jeremy535897

I think redundancy is the most likely outcome if employees refuse to work short time. There can be knock on effects in areas like redundancy. See:
https://www.xperthr.co.uk/faq/where-an-employee-has-recently-changed-from-full-time-to-part-time-hours-how-should-their-redundancy-payment-be-calculated/60812/

sghughes42

What pension scheme are you in? My wife is in the USS scheme where the benefit accrues as a fraction of your income each year so you'd end up with a slightly lower contribution towards your final pension for this year. I'm no expert but it appears this scheme doesn't allow that part of the pension to be topped up but you can make extra payments in to an investment linked fund. The University might make some deal around that, but you would have no guarantee on the return, unlike the main scheme.