One shift being removed but all shift Day & Night at risk of redundancy - Help

Hi, I hope someone can help, I have posted a similar thread in the past, I really hope there is someone who can advise me.

I have been employed as a permanent nightshift worker with my current employer for the past two years. Our employer has a long term contract deal providing IT support to a large organisation. There are currently six engineers (including myself) providing this service, two of the engineers work on permanent dayshift and the other four of us work on permanent nightshift. Recently we were called into a meeting with our employer where we have been told that the customer now no longer wants to operate a dayshift, and wants only nightshift to remain. Our employer has said that all six engineers are going to be pooled together and scored against each other - this will cover experience, timekeeping, etc - and that this will be the basis of their decision about who they will keep and who they will let go. Is this fair? Surely if it is the dayshift that the customer wants to do away with, then it should be the dayshift engineers only who will be considered for redundancy or employment elsewhere in the company?
Any advice woud be gratefully received. Many thanks.

CB

Hi Crystal

This is a difficult one. If the day shift and the night shift do pretty much identical jobs, albeit at different times, then I suspect your employer may well be able to justify putting both shifts together into the pool. The odd thing is that I suspect they could have justified just making the day shift redundant if they had wanted to, but no doubt members of that shift would have cried foul if they had decided on that course of action. At the end of the day it is down to the employer to justify their actions and to act reasonably in the way they carry out the redundancies.

Of course, it may well be that members of the day shift will not want to work at night (or may be unable to).

I suggest you raise your objections during the consultation period but be prepared to accept that they may have no effect.

Best of luck

Pete