Unfair dismissal?

garak112 said:
II don't think he will do anything about it, but he's going to end up stuffed because he will only get statutory minimum redundancy pay.
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As a director he must have a pretty poor contract if he is only entitled to statutory redundancy. It is complicated as it depends on how he employed as a director, is he a director shareholder, director employee, director office holder and so on...if he is a director as employee then he has to be treated as an employee and therefore the selection process must be fair and is the easiest way to remove a director....as an office holder there must be a procedure set out in the companies articles of association and these must be followed, including a vote by all the shareholders to remove.

Either way CAB isn't really the best place to get advice..contact ACAS and get specialist legal advice.
 
Biohazard said:
If it was something like a directors loan then it isn't really a dividend especially if it is detrimental to cashflow or will torpedo the business. As an FD he could refuse to sign it off...
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This - the amount was so large that he convinced the other directors (including the FD) that it put the company in severe jeopardy.
 
Castiel said:
As a director he must have a pretty poor contract if he is only entitled to statutory redundancy. It is complicated as it depends on how he employed as a director, is he a director shareholder, director employee, director office holder and so on...if he is a director as employee then he has to be treated as an employee and therefore the selection process must be fair and is the easiest way to remove a director....as an office holder there must be a procedure set out in the companies articles of association and these must be followed, including a vote by all the shareholders to remove.

Either way CAB isn't really the best place to get advice..contact ACAS and get specialist legal advice.
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No idea how its structured, but I know it took him several years to get a contract. He didn't bother chasing it up because he trusted them.
 
cm1179 said:
sounds like his face not longer fits.
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There's this to consider.

The thing with tribunals is this:

If they want you out, you're out.

You may win your tribunal but the tribunal CANNOT give you your job back - and by the end of it you will not want it back anyway.

All it can give you is money and in 90% of cases this amount is, in the scheme of things, trifling.

What you give the tribunal is six months to a year of sleepless nights and stressed days that you will a) never get back and b) should have been spent looking for a new job.

Sure, if you're looking at a £250k payout then go for it, get a great lawyer and make yourself some money. If you're a normal person then all you're doing is getting angry over something you can never win.

I got £1k for mine which swiftly disappeared into making up the difference between getting unfairly fired and finding a new job. I wasted half a year getting bent out of shape over something I couldn't win.

Here's the really bad part - I'm informed, I believe reliably so, that if i'd sucked it up and gone quietly into my new position in a different company, I could have returned in 2 years in a much higher position than I was fired from. I don't have that option because I kicked up a huge stink and got my name marked. Huge mistake.
 
garak112 said:
No idea how its structured, but I know it took him several years to get a contract. He didn't bother chasing it up because he trusted them.
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May I ask what directors position he currently holds, it is rare that a director is made redundant (as it is generally very complicated and contractually Directors usually have a range of benefits and severance packages attached to their terms), normally they are removed either by shareholder vote or more usually by mutual consent?

I resigned (amicably) as a director last year and received a pre-negotiated severance package as per my contract, if I had been made redundant or left by mutual consent then I would have received significantly more.....
 
sad as it is the company decided they no longer needed your dads position and are going to give him severence pay not redunt pay legaly they can do it
 
garak112 said:
This - the amount was so large that he convinced the other directors (including the FD) that it put the company in severe jeopardy.
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You would need to wait to see what the outcome of this was, and if the FD signed it off or not. If he did it is probably a bit harder to link. Had he been the FD himself it could have been another story.
 
Talk to a lawyer.

Ignore everything else anyone says, and talk to a Lawyer.

Ultimately however, if he's both CEO and major shareholder, there's ****** all he can do.

So long as the redundancy is being done in the correct way. Most commonly done, I believe, through a restructuring of the company that will make your Dad's position no longer necessary. If he makes him 'redundant' and just hires someone else to do his job, then it might be interesting...

kd
 
Listen to Castiel in this situation all the comments he has made have been spot on.

Its very hard to compare directors from company to company, all sorts of things such as who else owns shares, what contracts say etc will help to show if hes a real director or a director in job title only. The fact he owns some shares may or may not make a difference, if hes required to hold shares as part of his role hes much more likely to be a real director than a job title only, but even then its not clear cut without understanding exactly what is in his contract.

Its a while since I read up so I am little rusty in this area but iirc you cannot make a true director redundant under any circumstances, they have to resign or be voted off the board. My suspicion is however he isn't a true director and as such redundancy is the correct process.

If hes really an employee and has been selected for redundancy then his only angle is that hes been unfairly selected as a result of the company not following due process. If the company is quite small they likely do not even have a formal policy and as such its harder to say they haven't followed policy. Even if they haven't followed policy he is probably ****** anyway.
 
Castiel said:
I do not think that Redundancy can be treated as unfair dismissal easily..it is generally deemed as a fair dismissal....however if you can prove that they were being unreasonable in making the redundancy and that they didn't follow reasonable procedures then you might have a case...but on the face of it and unless there are exceptional circumstances that can be proven then the employer is not liable to an unfair dismiss case if they offer redundancy.
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Redundancy is used as a way to remove employees they cannot easily sack.

Its more common than you think for redundancy to be misused and the company sued for wrongful dismissal.

Now you will ask me to cite references.

Where I worked in 2007 a husband and wife where "made redundant" due to the new owner just plain and simply not liking them and not wanting to pay them the wages they were on for jobs he wanted to do himself and not being unable to sack them due to the time served and almost faultless disciplinary records.

They were both successful at a tribunal for wrongful dismissal (as the jobs were effectively still there) and the new owner was left some 30k out of pocket.
 
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atpbx said:
Redundancy is used as a way to remove employees they cannot easily sack.

Its more common than you think for redundancy to be misused and the company sued for wrongful dismissal.

Now you will ask me to cite references.

Where I worked in 2007 a husband and wife where "made redundant" due to the new owner just plain and simply not liking them and not wanting to pay them the wages they were on for jobs he wanted to do himself and not being unable to sack them due to the time served and almost faultless disciplinary records.

They were both successful at a tribunal for wrongful dismissal (as the jobs were effectively still there) and the new owner was left some 30k out of pocket.
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Anecdotes aside, I did not say that Redundancy was always fair, if you read what I said it is clear that I stated Redundancy is treated as a fair dismissal when all the correct procedures are followed, this includes fair selection and reasonable alternatives considered...in the exceptional circumstance (and given the amount of redundancies to wrongful/unfair dismissal cases, it is exceptional) that a redundancy can be shown to have been applied unfairly then a case may be had.

Redundancy itself is grounds for Fair Dismissal, unless the grounds (usually by unfair selection) can be proven otherwise.

In the case of Directors it is far more complex and depends on the status of the Director and the contractual and Official capacities of the Director involved as well as the way the company is structured.
 
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