We recently posted an article entitled the Practice of Bumping In Redundancies, which highlighted a new trend that was creeping into tribunals here in Ireland. This practice is very common in the UK and focus' on employees being selected for redundancy who may be in a managerial role, and instead of making them redundant they move this employee into a more junior role, and make one of the junior employees redundant instead. They effectively 'bump' someone else out of the Company.
Another recent EAT decision has highlighted this as being an increasingly common argument for employees who claim they have been unfairly selected for redundancy.
The case of Flanaghan -v- Castlethorn Construction UD1451/2010 is worth looking at in relation to this as the employee in this instance tried to argue that other employees should make way for him to be retained. What is interesting is that in this case the tribunal noted
“Part of the claimant’s argument implies that certain other employees doing different kinds of work should have been moved to make way for him to do this work because he had done that kind of work in the past and was trained to do it. Had this happened it seems to us that such employees would have justifiable complaints.”
This is important as we previously highlighted that any employer engaging in or considering 'Bumping' must also take into consideration those employees which are being bumped as if they have over one years service they would be covered by the Unfair Dismissals Act and so would be entitled to claim they were unfairly dismissed.
In this case the employee was unsuccessful in their claim and it is worth noting from employers and HR professionals that this situation is becoming more and more prominent and potentially needs to be considered in redundancy scenarios.
