Unfair treatment?

Hi

I work for a small company (approx 30) which has just declared 7-8 posts to be at risk. Everyone was marched into the office on Monday this week (23rd) and told whether or not their job was at risk, but not the folks in my office. There are 4 of us in the same role. We were told that there would be only 3 full time posts required and were left to go back to them with any ideas for how this might be solved (one of my colleagues works 4 days).

At this time we had not been given our letters with details of redundancy payment etc. We had to ask for forecasts which were given impromptu late on Monday after having to request them. We then got our official letters on Tuesday, one of which later had to be corrected as the payment quoted was completely wrong. Not good information on which to try and base a decision!! We had all advised them by 10AM on Weds (my colleague did not work Tuesday) that there were no volunteers and passed it to them to decide who was to go. We have been told they will TRY to get back to us by the end of tomorrow Friday (before the bank holiday weekend). If we go our last day will be 13th September and we are being paid a month in lieu of notice.

I have 2 concerns:

1. I feel we are not being given fair and equal treatment with regards to the rest of the company who already know their position. We have worked all week in this stressful situation not being any the wiser and potentially may have the weekend to go too. This cuts deeply into any time to organise anything else.

2. As there is very little to choose between any of us using the usual scoring criteria that may be applied (they have a very insubstantial 'back of a fag packet' appraisal system here which I cannot see being of much use), and our manager has informed us that she won't be involved in any decision at all (providing performance data) , how can this ever be a fair and accurate representation of us?

With this in mind, would any of this bear weight at a tribunal, should the unlucky person decide to pursue it?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice

Comparison with the rest of the company would only help you as a frame of reference if you were claiming for unfair dismissal and wanted to demonstrate that a fair procedure was not used.

Sounds as though the problem is you have not been told what selection criteria will be used and given an opportunity to raise any issues or concerns with those criteria.

I think you should formally request details of the criteria that they are proposing to use and an opportunity to feed back to them in terms of any concerns with those criteria. If that is refused you, then the person who is made redundant might have a case. The stuff about letters being inaccurate and not given in a timely manner is fairly minor in itself but could form part of a claim should someone feel they have been selected unfairly and want to take it further.