Redundant?....Me?

Hullo ma wee blog,

March 10th. Working from home.

The phone rang and I picked it up after a couple of rings, checked the name on the screen, saw it was our head of dept and pressed answer. "Hi boss, how are you?". Unusual but not completely unheard of. We exchanged pleasantries for a moment as I automatically continued work on the item on my laptop and then he said "Alistair, I need you to come for a meeting with me" Thinking it was about a work allocation or project I said "ok, where and when" He immediately came back with " Tomorrow 11.00am in Birmingham".

I felt an instant hit of something like adrenaline, a definite twinge of minor anxiety. This was something a bit different then. I remember hesitating a moment and saying that I already had an appointment in Edinburgh as I was meeting my team leader for my end of year review. I got another jolt when I heard "Its cancelled I'm afraid. This will have to take priority" come back at me. "Take a couple of hours to make any changes to your plans for tomorrow and any travel arrangements and we'll talk later to make sure its all arranged."

Somewhere in my guts a little bastard switched on a washing machine and left the room.

The next day in a room with my head of dept and a company personnel manager I was told after 32 years of service that I was being made redundant in a short perfunctory interview of about 15 minutes, held without advising me of any right to representation. More than half of the dept I worked in got the same message.

Two days later I was told that although selected for redundancy the company wanted to retain my skills and would be looking for a position. I was told that the selection criteria was performance and I expressed surprise as I had always been a green rated performer. I was told there were a lot of those in my dept. Not surprising considering the job we did I suppose, as a project manager for an international company. My head of dept explained that he was given responsibility for deciding who stayed and had ranked us in performance. I asked him how this had been done as we worked across the country and he managed the team remotely through a group of team leaders who had also all been made redundant and he said very clearly " My decision, no one else involved, although I took into consideration previous conversations with the team leaders."

Two weeks after that the company posted record profits and announced 26000 new jobs planned for the year ahead.

Between then and redundancy I was advised of two jobs, one of which was advised as not available the day after, and was sent for one interview where on arrival I was told that the job didn't exist.

I had asked for a copy of the selection criteria and my completed form. It took almost two weeks for my head of dept to supply this and I found that my selection was based on evidence of 130 words after 32 years service. I disagreed vehemently with 90% of what had been written and called my ex team leader to review what my head of dept had written. He said he was non plussed and that none of the negative comments listed had ever been discussed with him in any way and that as I was due my annual review on the day of initial advice of redundancy would not have been any part of my review.

Strangely the staff selected to remain were spread across the UK in a perfect geographical split.

That's the basis of me starting fight the company on the grounds of unfair selection.

Since then I have found that the process used has been in my opinion, and it is only MY opinion, unfair and unreasonable, and through lack of a clear scoring process and a lack of review by senior management, left one person to make highly subjective decisions which has affected me and my future adversely.

there are many other issues involved and included but that's the bones of the story.

yesterday i went to a stage two appeal of the company appeals process, the first appeal having decided that although some aspects may not have been handled correctly, and that as a result of my feedback several points have been fed back to be considered in a review of the process, the underlying decision to dismiss was fair and reasonable.

I don't expect the 2nd stage appeal to do anything other than regurgitate the first decision and have already engaged a lawyer to represent me at an employment tribunal in early December.

We will see what the outcome is in time. But in the meantime I am job hunting.


see you later.

listening to Debussy.....'The Girl With the Flaxen Hair'