This EAT has ruled that where the employee is dismissed and re-engaged under new terms and conditions while essentially performing the same work, this is not redundancy. The case concerned a group of financial advisors ("FA’s") selling insurance to customers. The Co-op thought this was inefficient and out-dated and tried but failed to negotiate an agreement on the changes, so it served notice to end the current contracts and offered to employ the FAs on a new contract with the changed duties. The tribunal found that the new terms and conditions related to the same sales force carrying out the same "work of a particular kind" and that it was simply performed in a different way, and that this did not amount to a redundancy. However, the EAT concluded that the enhanced payment could be incorporated in the contract of employment, despite the words which apparently negated any intent on the Co-op’s part to be contractually bound. Consequently, enhanced payment would indeed incorporated in the old contracts and therefore would have been contractually binding if there had been redundancy – which in this case there was not.
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