is this legal ?

Legacy_user

a friend wants to withdraw his notice [had give 1 months notice decided to withdraw within a few days] but the employer wants in writing that he will not leave before they will consider his request :mad: can they do this ?
thanks for your comments.

ohreally

Your friend is in a potentialy precarious position as the resignation notice may only be recinded if it suits the employer to do so.

custardy

what do you mean wont leave?
within a set period of time?
as said his employer could just refuse

LittleVoice

CHRISSYG wrote: »

a friend wants to withdraw his notice [had give 1 months notice decided to withdraw within a few days] but the employer wants in writing that he will not leave before they will consider his request :mad: can they do this ?
thanks for your comments.

Are they asking him to guarantee that he won't resign again within, say, six months?

They can do this because it would be considered a variation to his contract which has been negotiated following his submitting his resignation.

They could simply accept his resignation and then offer a new one with the new term requiring a longer notice period (actually reducing over time as the - in the above case, six months - period elapsed).

It would be sensible for the employer. They may already have incurred costs in recruiting a replacement and don't want to have those same costs again within a short period of time.

System

they had incurred no costs as it had only been 3 days , they want a written statement with no time scale

withabix

He has handed in his notice.

His employer doesn't have to allow him to withdraw it.

LittleVoice

CHRISSYG wrote: »

they had incurred no costs as it had only been 3 days , they want a written statement with no time scale

Three days doesn't mean they haven't incurred any costs. If I receive written notice from a member of staff that they are leaving in a month's time, I may well start looking for a replacement straight away (unless I have already decided that a restructure is a good idea). This is necessary given that the replacement will themselves in all probability have to give a month's notice.

If my normal custom is to advertise, then I would have already commited expenditure for an advertisement. And I would certainly have spent time on the process, revising job description/person spec and so on.

As an employer, I also know that it is quite likely that someone will leave in the first couple of months of joining or (as it would be in this case) after withdrawing a resignation. That is because they will probably have already started the application process for other jobs - and one of those may be a better job which is then offered to them.

They can't demand a statement that someone will never leave. Or if they did it would not be possible to enforce it. So perhaps what they want is agreement to a longer notice period. They would know that this would give them a bit more stability and time to find someone else when the time came to recruit someone new.

They should also be asking themselves why your friend wanted to leave. He was clearly dissatisfied with the organisation and therefore they should wonder whether they want to have a dissatisfied employee.