12th October 2011, 04:01 PM
As others have said I think the wording of their contract of employment is probably key here, however these often have a clause in them allowing temporary variations which fall in the employers favour... However to play devil's advocate (and I know no details of this case), this does not at first glance seem like a unit that is necessarily pulling a swift one. I doubt that there is any financial gain to be had for the unit to contract out their staff to another organisation. I am also assuming that the reason for contracting staff out is because the unit in question doesn't have enough work on their own books to keep the staff going.
Times are tough - I know this isn't a reason to accept bad terms and conditions - but it may simply be a case of the unit not wanting to let experienced staff go, but temporarily having no work and no money to pay them. Whilst your friend sounds pretty disillusioned with the company - and this may just be the straw that broke the camels back, there may be others who are more than willing to accept this short term hardship in order to be able to stay employed at the same unit/stay in the same house/not have to be made unemployed. This happened to me in the past - I wasn't pleased about being subbed out at the time and there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end I was happy to spend six weeks contracted out and keep my job. There's not a lot of work about in some parts of the country, and perhaps we should be applauding a company that is trying to maintain some form of continuity for their employees. The simple option may have been just to lay the least experienced staff off and be done with it. This company seems to have taken the perhaps harder route of trying to find some subcontracted work for its staff - in my experience this can take some considerable hard work behind the scenes to pull off. Maybe they should be thanked for the efforts they've gone to, rather than assuming the company has an ulterior motive...?:face-stir:
Times are tough - I know this isn't a reason to accept bad terms and conditions - but it may simply be a case of the unit not wanting to let experienced staff go, but temporarily having no work and no money to pay them. Whilst your friend sounds pretty disillusioned with the company - and this may just be the straw that broke the camels back, there may be others who are more than willing to accept this short term hardship in order to be able to stay employed at the same unit/stay in the same house/not have to be made unemployed. This happened to me in the past - I wasn't pleased about being subbed out at the time and there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end I was happy to spend six weeks contracted out and keep my job. There's not a lot of work about in some parts of the country, and perhaps we should be applauding a company that is trying to maintain some form of continuity for their employees. The simple option may have been just to lay the least experienced staff off and be done with it. This company seems to have taken the perhaps harder route of trying to find some subcontracted work for its staff - in my experience this can take some considerable hard work behind the scenes to pull off. Maybe they should be thanked for the efforts they've gone to, rather than assuming the company has an ulterior motive...?:face-stir: