Unfair? Business asking employees to buy more holidays

sharpe106

Dr_Crypto said:

sharpe106 said:

Some companies allow you to buy so call extra leave, basically unpaid leave so they can do that, but the forced part would not be legal. 

Why would it be illegal? BA are doing it with their pilots and I think Virgin Atlantic too. 

If it was forced it would be unlawful deduction of wages. 

From what I can see the pilots at BA have agreed to it granted not happily but they have not refused. 

Dr_Crypto

According to the BBC, BA have told the pilots to have an additonal 2 weeks unpaid holiday between now and April (I think). 

sharpe106

Yes and they have agreed although unhappily. If they had not agreed and BA had just done it anyway then that would have been different. 

epm-84

Dr_Crypto said:

According to the BBC, BA have told the pilots to have an additonal 2 weeks unpaid holiday between now and April (I think). 

Some contracts have short term lay off clauses, if you do have that clause you should get £25/day guarantee pay for the first week.  If they don't the employees need to agree to any unpaid leave, the employer cannot force you to take it.  BA employees are represented by a trade union which means they can agree to it on behalf of their members.

diggingdude

I guess you can they can all say no and hope they are not one of the people made redundant

epm-84

diggingdude said:

I guess you can they can all say no and hope they are not one of the people made redundant

It's true they may be more likely to make people redundant if employees don't agree to unpaid leave.  Also you could say unpaid leave is fairer than asking people to take a pay cut and then to continue working the same number of hours.  However, employers should take individual's circumstances in to consideration - those in lower paid roles are less likely to have lots of disposable income meaning they may get in to financial difficulty by taking unpaid leave.

warby68

If the employer needs,or even wants, to reduce its wage bill, its unlikely to just give up if Plan A can't be implemented.
This is therefore  down to considering the lesser of the evils.
In terms of fairness, this plan is probably about as fair as can be achieved, applied equally across everybody with, presumably, some element of choice when the leave is taken plus these schemes tend to spread the 'charge' to the employee over the full year so you don't have to take the hit all in the relevent 2 weeks.
As I can't think of any alternatives that wouldn't be less drastic for a proportion of individuals it depends if you want to force this 'lottery' and hope you're one of the lucky ones or accept the principle of a bit of pain for everyone but hopefully a job for everyone too.
PS I suppose they could ask for volunteers for redundancy or to take even more unpaid leave before divvying up any additional cost saving between the others but they probably want to keep it simple for now and these 2 more drastic actions are potentially disruptive if they actually expect to get back to normal within a year or so.