Fuck. Where did my job go?

Having been taken over by another company in the same line of work earlier this year, I found out today that the "proposed restructuring" is an "actual restructuring." With the creation of another tier of management. Lovely. Not that the new manager's job was advertised or anything like that -- it just appeared. Thus giving the senior manager the chance to upgrade herself to a "director."

At the moment, my small department is protected by TUPE (look it up wink), but I forsee a point in the not-to-distant future where we'll have to apply for our own jobs as a result of this restructure -- losing any legal protection of our terms & conditions that we might have.

The way the new bosses operate is that, when they restructure, they incorporate TUPE-ed staff on the basis of salary, not function or responsibility. Which means that -- since my old company's salaries where generally lower than the new one's -- we're automatically slotted into more "junior" jobs. So for instance, co-workers in one department have found themselves being managed by people with almost identical job descriptions and responsibilities to them.

We decided this morning we're going to demand a meeting with the director that we all attend, rather than having our line manager pass our concerns up the line, so we'll see what happens. There is the scope for lodging a formal grievance also....

Finally, I'm pretty sure that this process is also an attack on our union recognition agreement. One of the grounds that an employer can derecognise a union on is that the "bargaining unit" for which the union had bargaining rights no longer exists. This pattern of restructuring is taking place across the country, and across all the different departments.

A more-than-a-little annoying thing in all this is that my union is a donor to my employer -- a national charity. I've raised this at union meetings in the past, since it seems clear enough to me that they're an anti-union employer that the union shouldn't be giving money to. I got the impression that my co-workers couldn't really see what the problem was, but given recent developments, it might be worth raising this again.


Joseph Kay
Aug 22 2006 18:16
the button wrote:

more-than-a-little kafka-esque, you want protection from the boss - so you pay your dues, then the union pays the boss to union-bust wall

a similar process happened to someone i know (charity sector). they were all told their jobs no longer existed, but they could reapply for technically different jobs (i.e. identical ones). The catch was there were fewer jobs at a lower pay grade to reapply for angry