M&S Redundancy package to be reduced
August 27, 2008
Looks like we can expect some redundancies at retail giant M&S in the next few months or couple of years. The company is currently consulting with staff representatives on the redundancy package, in order to reduce the payouts available to its workers. Currently redundant workers over 41 are entitled to 3.75 weeks’ pay for every year of service, but the company proposes to reduce this to 3 weeks, and hopes to do so by 1st September. Staff aged between 22 and 40 would see their entitlement reduce from 2.5 weeks per year of service to 2 weeks. This came out when a staff memo was ‘leaked’ to the times newspaper, and there are now fears that job cuts are soon to follow, despite M&S insisting that this is not the case.
According to employee representatives, the memo has apparently led to ‘an unprecedented level of feedback, concern and anger’, especially with the fact that last month Steven Esom, the ‘Food Director’ was given a £500,000 payout to leave the business because he was ‘not delivering’. However, even with the proposed changes, the chain will still have a redundancy package that is double the statutory entitlement and it will still compare favourably with most other high street chains. I’m sure this is little comfort to those long standing employees who now feel that their job is at risk, and their potential payout could be reduced by thousands of pounds.
One thing’s for sure – M&S are going to take a big hit to their reputation if they change their redundancy package and subsequently start making large scale redundancies within a short period of time, after promising that this exercise was simply to ‘update’ the policy in line with industry standards.
What do you think of this latest story?
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