Advice Please.....

A question about : Advice Please.....

I would be really grateful for some advice from anyone who has employment/contract legal experience.

I work for a blue chip company and have been with them for thirty years. Around five years ago the company decided to introduce a new contract type which of course is far less superior to the contract I hold in terms of wages, time off etc

The old contract people were told that we would only be replaced with the new contract people who work separately from us. As it stands at the moment there are three thousand off the new contract employees and nine thousand of us on the old contracts.

The new contract employees are expanding as we the old contract holders are shrinking with retirement etc

My question is this. As the old contract type holders shrink and we become the minority can our employer say we cannot afford to run the operation like this anymore so you have to go to the new contract type of you have to leave the organisation?

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Best answers:

• I'm not "up on" employment law, but I think the answer is no, particularly if all the "old hands" stick together.
  I have friends who have been in this situation, one works for an airline, the other (now retired) used to be a civil servant but the work was out-sourced and she found herself working for a private company but she retained her civil service contract clauses.
  I do work with contracts of another type (construction) and as is said often, "the contract is the contract" and it cannot be varied as to the clauses therein without bi-partisan agreement.
• The one word of caution is to look carefully at anything in the old contract that is discretionary.
  When I worked for a banking group they too decided to harmonise the myriad of contracts that were out there onto a single version but it was "optional" for those on existing contracts on if they wanted to transfer or not. Personally I did but a number in a recently acquired company had 6 months notice periods (vs our 3) and more generous redundancy money decided to stick to their old ones as they feared they'd be made redundant. Somewhat needless to say when it came to discretionary bonus season all those that had stuck on old contracts werent awarded any bonuses.
• I would expect at some point they will look to move all old contracts onto th new ones but I can't imagine it will be for a while until the majority at least hold the new contracts.
  They will need a valid business reason and run the risk of being taken to a tribunal but they can do it.