Personal car breakdown when on business use - who pays for repairs?

BenL

You could suggest work has a pool car or two for people in your situation or take the managing directors car to the meeting if its within the work day.

lisyloo

what if they didn't have their own car?

If it was said at interview that you need your on car to do the job, then that's fairly clear to me.
If they didn't ahve one, then I would have thought that you options are
1) get a car
2) don't take the job
3) find alternative transport
4) negotiate

Is that a condition of the job or just something that was mentioned in passing?

I don't know if it's in the contract but something said at interview that you "need" for the job is also not "in passing" IMO.
It doesn't sound like anything has been hidden from this person.
They have not been misled.
They agreed without thinking it through or fully realising the issues (possibly because they wanted the job) and now dislike the situation. Sometimes you don't know what parking or trafiic is like until you get somewhere.

but once you have got it things can change!

Negotiation is definitely possible.
There may even be a "win win" situation.
Look for people in a similar situation, contribute some posistive suggestions (a number alredy suggested), use it as an opportunity to demostrate that you are a posistive individual who can come up with ideas (wow, wish I could do all that).
It doesn't encessarily have to be a battle. It may also be a problem for someone else as well.

mymatebob

I would be interested to know if the OP said - "My car in now knackered so I no longer have one"

What would be the employers response?

lisyloo

What would be the employers response?

Depends on a number of factors, but if it's a condition of the deal, then it could be dismissal.

mymatebob

lisyloo wrote: »

Depends on a number of factors, but if it's a condition of the deal, then it could be dismissal.

Could be any number of things - we will never know I suspect

wolvoman

lisyloo wrote: »

Depends on a number of factors, but if it's a condition of the deal, then it could be dismissal.

I hope not... an employment lawyer would have a field day with that.

It's one thing to ask an employee to provide some tools to do the job, but to fire someone for not doing so..? Would be upheld at a tribunal in mintes.

vaio

wolvoman wrote: »

I hope not... an employment lawyer would have a field day with that.

It's one thing to ask an employee to provide some tools to do the job, but to fire someone for not doing so..? Would be upheld at a tribunal in minutes.

if you've only been in the job a short time they don't have to give a reason for sacking you (and they would be mad to do so as if they did then the whole contractual disciplinary/grievance system would swing into action with the resulting breach of contract possibilities)

lisyloo

I hope not... an employment lawyer would have a field day with that.

You have no employment rights with less than 2 years service.
Now there is a hell of a lot we don't know here and I'm not saying it is the most likely possibility but I'm warning agasint taking that approach (the one mentioned in post #24).

It was made quite clear that it was a condition of the job up front.
No-one has had the wool pulled over their eyes or been mis-led here.
I can understand that there are many reasons that someone might agree to something they later regret but just refusing is not the way to approach the matter.

There is a whole host of things we don't know but if the employer was looking to get rid of someone anyway then being intransigent is a great way to promote yourself to the top of the redundancy list.

On the other hand the employee may be a highly valued individual and the employer may bend over backwards to keep them.

I'm jsut saying that shrugging your shoulders and saying "your problem" is not really the best way to approach it, especially when it was something that was clearly stated and agreed to up front.
The time to negotiate these things is before you take the job but if you made a mistake (understandable) then it's now your problem and just dumping the problem on them is a bad choice of approach in todays economic climate IMO.

This can perfectly legitimately lead to a poor score on a "flexibility" criteria in a redundancy round and there would be nothing an employment layer could do about it.
I've been through redundancy rounds several times and the criteria are subjective and very difficult to dispute.