Case Study - 20 jobs made redundant

During her performance appraisal in October 2001 Frieda raised with Arthur that she’d been with NSEW for almost two decades. A corporate HR manager, Frieda at 58 said that she was considering retirement during, the celebration date of her 20th year, 2002. Arthur made a mental note, and said it was up to her.

Arthur took 4 weeks leave. A busy Christmas period followed and then Frieda took leave in January returning a week before the graduates for 2002 arrived. Frieda’s retirement was not raised again until the first week of February when Arthur asked her in passing whether or not she had made a decision. “I’m still mulling it over” she said.

Less than 2 weeks later, on 14th February, the CEO and Arthur jointly announced a planned restructure for the entire organisation. A total of 120 permanent jobs would be made redundant. The CEO stated that he and Arthur had been working diligently since late December to minimise the impact on staff, and to keep the number of redundant jobs to the bare minimum. Standard redundancy payments would be made, plus staff with more than 5 years continuous service, would receive an extra 2 week’s salary for every year served beyond their 5th year.

Arthur met with Frieda to inform her that her 9 staff would be made redundant and the HR work and pay system would be outsourced; the Graduate Training Program would be picked up by line managers. Frieda was to manage the redundancy process for her staff and be the primary contact to provide HR advice to other areas making staff redundant. Arthur noted the process should conclude late March, before she retired, giving her time to tie up loose ends with the Graduate Training Program.

Frieda was stunned; an hour later she was outraged. Having made it known verbally that she’d like to retire, there was nothing in writing, yet she was denied a redundancy. Plus Arthur had initiated a conversation to try to confirm a retirement date, knowing 120 jobs including her own were to go. Frieda confronted Arthur “why didn’t you tell me about the redundancies.” He replied “you’d basically made a decision to retire. I can see how you consider it unfair, but it’s all about timing.”

As Frieda got up to leave Arthur added “look, when Ken retired last year, you know as well as I do that his payouts after a lifetime with NSEW were huge, there are lots of others worse off than yourself.” Frieda turned back in disbelief “I am an independent person, with 20 years service - it has nothing to do with my husband or his money.”

Proceed to Issue 1 - Things that could be going wrong
or
Back to EM2 Solution Home