Employer ends employment advice.

rich_shot2003

My wife has worked part time for a Cleaning company for about 3 years and need some advice as they have ended her employment and would like some advice on where my wife stands now with they have done.

A couple of months ago my wife was working 3 hours a week cleaning and the company who she worked for had a contract with the place where she cleaned and for some reason that contract was changed so my wife had hour hours cut to just 1 hour a week.

so she did the hour a week till a week last week when she tried to sign in at work via a app on phone that she had to sign in so her company knew she had gone to work and it came up with a error so she contacted her payroll about it and was told they would contact her last Thursday which never happened so she called again on friday and got a answer phone and left a message.

Then at abut 6pm on friday evening she got a email from her company which had a letter in it saying 

I am writing to you to inform you her company no longer hold the cleaning contract and that her manager had spoken to her about it(which manager has not and has not spoken to my wife for a couple of months) so that is a lie.

They also say in letter that it was

communicated to our accounts team that you were leaving employment and your last day of work

was Monday 17th April 2023.

No other logged hours data was recorded after 17th April 2023 which would indicate that you had

ceased employment.

but she has been to work since April and had been able to sign in and on her may wage slip it even has on it that she had been paid for Monday 24th April as she did the work on a Monday and now she has worked 2 monday,s in May due to bank holidays and going by the letter she will not get paid for them and going by the sounding of the letter they are making out that my wife had left the company which again is not true.

at the bottom of the letter it says that they had lost the contract with the place where she cleaned from June 1st which of course this is the reason why they have done this.

so where does my wife stand with this?

can they just make out my wife had left the company when she did not and we would not had known about this if she did not have problem signing in when she got to work.

when she 1st started the job 3 years ago they did not send her out a contract so we can not even see what it states in that about just ending her employment like this.

any advice please.

TBagpuss

She is entitled to be paid for the work she has done,. She is entitled to be paid for her notice period - if she had no written contract, and was not provided with information about notice periods in another way (e.g. offer letter) then her notice period would be statutory notice which is one week for each full year worked. 

It also sounds as though she is redundant as the job no longer exists as they have lost the contract. If that is the case then she is also entitled to redundancy pay https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-redundancy-pay and, as with any other situation where someone's job ends, she would been entitled to be paid for any holiday she has accrued but has not taken.

In the first instance, she should write to them, (keeping a copy of the letter or e-mail herself) to set out that she worked, continued to have access to the system and had a pay slip up to 24th April, and that she was ready, willing and able to work her normal contracted hours in May, and had not been given any information to suggest that her hours were changing or that she was being dismissed until Friday 26th May - that she has not at any time given notice, nor has she been given any information to suggest that she was being considered for redundancy, nor has she consented to any change to or termination of her contract  and that the letter received on 26th was the first time she has been told that the company was seeking to terminate her employment, and ask them to clarify the current situation and in particular:

1. Whether they are seeking to state that she is at risk of redundancy and if so, provide her with all of the required information relating to that process and

2. If they are dismissing her, details of the reasons,  timing and a calculation of the notice and / or redundancy pay due to her and how this has been calculated, and again, details of the process they propose to follow.

She may want to call ACAS and/or citizens advice for further advice.

It sounds as though they haven't followed the required procedures and while that wont stop them from making her redundant it may mean that they have to pay her for another couple of weeks while they go back and follow the correct process.  Since she carried on working on the reduced hours she will be deemed to have accepted the change from 3 to 1 hour a week so any notice and redundancy will be calculated on the 1 hour per week role. 

timstyles

The cleaning company she worked for may have lost the contract, but another company probably took it instead. I don't know what the circumstances are, but this often happens to outsource cleaning companies for public services when the tender comes up for renewal, and they are not successful in retaining it. Under TUPE, it will be a service provision change in such circumstances and if it is the case that this has occurred with your wife's employer, she would automatically transfer to the new cleaning service provider, whereupon all her contractual terms will be retained. 

At the very least, it's an unfair dismissal and breach of contract. Although only working a couple of hours per week, it is worth her taking this further - tribunals are free at the point of use. If they say she was dismissed in April there is little point in appealing. Go straight to ACAS pre-claim conciliation and ask for a settlement. She is also entitled to between 2 and 4 weeks' pay if she did not receive a written statement of terms and conditions of employment (if she is successful in her dismissal claim) in addition to the unlawful deduction from pay, wrongful and unfair dismissal.

Undervalued

timstyles said:

The cleaning company she worked for may have lost the contract, but another company probably took it instead. I don't know what the circumstances are, but this often happens to outsource cleaning companies for public services when the tender comes up for renewal, and they are not successful in retaining it. Under TUPE, it will be a service provision change in such circumstances and if it is the case that this has occurred with your wife's employer, she would automatically transfer to the new cleaning service provider, whereupon all her contractual terms will be retained. 

At the very least, it's an unfair dismissal and breach of contract. Although only working a couple of hours per week, it is worth her taking this further - tribunals are free at the point of use. If they say she was dismissed in April there is little point in appealing. Go straight to ACAS pre-claim conciliation and ask for a settlement. She is also entitled to between 2 and 4 weeks' pay if she did not receive a written statement of terms and conditions of employment (if she is successful in her dismissal claim) in addition to the unlawful deduction from pay, wrongful and unfair dismissal.

No, there is a possibility it might be.

It might also be that they could argue that she was on a zero hour contract.

Even if not zero hour, then this may well be a redundancy situation. Yes she would be entitled to a very small amount of statutory redundancy pay plus of course payment for all work done, plus statutory notice.

There is no longer an entitlement to compensation for failure to provide written particulars of employment. If she has a valid tribunal clam for something else, this can be added to the claim (it can no longer be brought on its own). The tribunal has discretion to make an award for this, but doesn't have to. It ceased to be automatic quite a few years ago.

Savvy_Sue

TUPE is a possibility but not necessarily an absolute right. And it's even possible that there is no other company now doing that cleaning: for an hour a week it could be tempting to take the cleaning in-house or employ Fred's neighbours' daughter direct.