Reapplying for jobs is ‘the fair way’ – HSSD
Saturday 27th November 2010, 2:29PM GMT.
MAKING civil servants reapply for their jobs is the fairest way of restructuring a department, according to the Health and Social Services minister.
Hunter Adam (pictured) was commenting on the announcement that four HSSD directors would have to reapply for their posts after the roles were expanded or adjusted.
There are currently six director positions, but that number will drop to five when the director of adult services retires.
The finance director post is already vacant. Once those roles have been filled, the department will look at reducing the overall numbers in its management structure.
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Fair to who? Fair to the previous post holder by preventing anyone else from applying? I dont see any jobs advertised anywhere. Why are they doing this if noone else can apply?
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Should the words Fair and Guernsey ever be in the same sentence
People are now more aware and thats why they are leaving in their droves
Until the finance sector is cleansed of its cancer the island will continue to slide downhill
I suggest starting with the gfsc and bringing in uk experts
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Presumably, this re-application means that they will be either made redundant and re-employed; or just made redundant. Looks like an expensive unfair dismissal/discrimination case coming up here.
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Bob – there are hardly any discrimination laws in Guernsey and redundancy is an acceptable reason for dismissal as long as the selection process doesn’t discriminate according to our discrimination laws. Therefore the company would have to look at their process. It would be deemed to be unfair if they were chosen for redundancy due to any of the following reasons;
• They are in a trade union or are associated with the trade union.
• Because they are pregnant or for any other reason connected with her pregnancy
• Because the employee asserted a (relevant) statutory right
• In connection with health and safety
• A protected shop worker refusing to work on Sundays.
Therefore (as pointed out in a previous thread) HSSD are free to discriminate due to age, religion, race, sexuality or because they support Spurs instead of Arsenal. However, (again my main argument in the aforementioned thread) as the States are the largest employer in the island I would expect them to be leading the way for best practise.
Nothing wrong with asking people to reapply for their jobs but in my mind it gives false hope, is time consuming and overall unnecessary. Draw up a structure (i.e 3 accountants not 5), pool all your employee’s per role (i.e there are 2 senior accountants and only need 1) tell them they are at threat of redundancy, offer voluntary redundancy (would only offer on large scale redundancies otherwise you’re at threat of losing the person you actually want to keep!), then make the final selection based on length of service and performance history (absence, disciplinary, appraisals). You’re not making the staff jump through hoops and stressing them out by re-interviewing them for a role they’ve done for x amount of years.
No law on redundancy pay so are not obligated to pay a severance but if HSSD wanted to be nice would also base that on age and length of service (the older longer serving employees get the most).
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Lynnie – the law is a lot looser than that.
Your assertion about an employer’s ability to discriminate without being held to account is wrong, I think. An employer can be held to have dismissed unfairly for any reason. The bullet point situations you cite are deemed automatically unfair, but there are no circumstances that are deemed automatically fair. That in itself shows that there are discrimination laws – anti-employer ones. The remaining situations you give as being instances where an employer is free to discriminate are all potentially unfair. As all are to some degree unreasonable, most in my opinion would be held to be unfair should they ever reach a tribunal, as they are not substantial reasons. Free to make those discriminations is not the same as those discriminations having no consequence. Care to give me an example where one of those, or indeed anything similar has been upheld locally as fair?
Most tribunal cases are decided on whether the employer got the paperwork right, not on the quality or otherwise of the reason for dismissal. Many more cases are settled without hearing, not because there are good defence grounds, but simply to avoid costs and publicity.
An employer the size of the states has its procedures, and I agree that they should be pathfinders for best practice. They should’t lose on paperwork alone.
The process of making four redundant to re-employ three is a case-in-waiting. It singles out the one that isn’t re-hired, and the law should look straight through the arrangements to see whether the overall process was fair on that (now ex)employee. Your assertion that the re-hire be based on past performance would almost certainly be unfair in my opinion, as the employee not re-hired may never have received any conduct warnings in respect of those “deficiencies” used to discriminate against him/her in the re-hire process. The effective result could be dismissal for being late once, with no warning. Fair, you think?
Any redundancy pay would have to be in accordance with contract of employment. The states should NEVER be “nice” for the sake of it. The CS have stonking terms and conditions and decent pensions. “Nice” would be an absolute abuse of the HSSD budget, particularly given their deciding not to fund cancer screening, and their attempt to hijack the museums budget to cover their inefficiencies.
By transferring people around other departments, the states should be able to not have to make anyone redundant. Regrettably, commercial life isn’t that straightforward any more.
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Bob, I can’t tell you how happy I am that finally someone can debate an issue with me and bring up good and valid points and not just hurl insults.
Yes the reasons I gave are the reasons for automatically unfair and yes if an employer chose to model their process on the other points I gave above it could still be deemed as unfair by a tribunal. There isn’t a lot of case law to research as a lot of employers don’t want to chance the system and in most cases it’s of course more cost effective to pay off the employee rather than pay legal fees and time out for case preparation and hearings. I’m sure this happens in the States too considering the lack of cases the States have had against them. However, any award can be appealed and if they wanted to use any of those points I mentioned above in their selection criteria they could argue that they had a business reason to do so. Which could mean then that the dismissal isn’t unfair.
The point regarding selection criteria based on performance, my apologies I probably didn’t make myself that clear. I of course meant documented and existing performance concerns. Such as disciplinary warnings which are still active. However (again I’m not too sure how likely this would be) if you had to choose between two employees who had exactly the same length of service (started in the same year) and did the same job then it could be argued that as Joe Bloggs was reprimanded recently for being late that it was the deciding factor…again without seeing case laws it’s difficult to say how this would stand up. If it was me who was completing the redundancy for this reason I would at least like a documented recent reprimand.
I remember being put in a redundancy situation a few years ago and we were all asked to reapply for our roles. Complete waste of time in my opinion as I knew that I was the last one in so would be the first one out. As it is a few resigned and I held on to my post by the skin of my teeth.
Hmmm yes nice, wrong word. If they wanted a QUICK resolve then maybe tie in with a compromise agreement and pay a settlement (redundancy pay). Redundancy pay is separate to notice period so they would be entitled to their notice period regardless (or pay in lieu of) and anything on top is a bonus, doesn’t necessarily have to be stipulated in their contract or handbook. Even though they don’t have to of course, but again this could be cheaper than drawing out the process and may mean that the States can cherry pick and not be worried about any fall out. Then again with their HR resource and a team of lawyers then you have to ask why would they…surely they have all the expertise and can do it right first time round?
I guess we’ll see!
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Agree that quick and pragmatic would be more acceptable than nice.
Do the states do Quick and pragmatic, though? Would there follow some form of “abuse of procedure” hearing, and a witch-hunt against someone making such a decision?
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