I wanted to make a record of the meeting from last Thursday that really annoyed me. I wanted to post this at the time but I ran out of time. I hope that I can remember exactly all the details that got me mad.
Leading up to the meeting this is what had happened. The week before we had asked for an ex gratia payment on behalf of all staff. The governers would have to be willing to ask for it on our behalf. Last Monday we had received the following reply. "The governers are not against the idea of asking for an ex gratia payment in principle and this should be made from the excess funds released from sale of assets" This was good. the first sign that the governers were thinking about the staff. Then came the following "The sale could go two ways, Either a straight forward sale where there will be funds available for the ex gratia payment to come out of or a zero cash transfer of assets from one organisation to another. If the latter occurs obviously there will be no cash made for the ex gratia payment to be made from."
At the end of this meeting, we agreed to end the consultation process so that our redundancy notices could be issued. They wont issue the notices until the process is closed and we cant resign until the notices are issued(unless we want to lose all rights to any minimum redundancy payout)
When we left the meeting, we all agreed that the only reason the governers were willing to agree the princilpe of the ex gratia payment was because they had already had an offer for a zero cash transfer of assets leaving no cash available for the payment to be made.
This annoyed us. Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with another.
So we sought some legal advice and we penned a letter.
We asked that should a zero cash transfer occur we would like the ex gratia payments to be added to part of the debt that the new organisation was taking on.
then we got a reply.......

(to be continued)