In claims for unfair dismissal due to alleged redundancy, the burden of proof should be shared to enable an employee to have the cause of redundancy tried. In such a case, the employee should present evidence of an invalid cause – such as personal reasons – and the employer should account for the redundancy. With reference to their conflicting interests, the law favours the employer if the redundancy can be accounted for even if the employee maintains his or her position. This would have been reasonable practice if the employer’s evidence was subject to the same scrutiny as that of the employee but, as long as redundancy is considered a valid cause in itself, this is not the case. Redundancy does not come from nowhere, but it occurs when employers carry out their management decisions. However, redundancy has never been questioned unless there has literally been shortage of work, which, in turn, has left the management rights unrestricted. Thus, the employer has the exclusive right to decide how and to what extent the business should be run. The only requirement for a valid cause is for the employer to show that actual operational changes have been made. In reality, this means the burden of proof is not shared and the employee cannot have the cause of redundancy tried. This makes the order of hiring the remaining protection against unfair dismissal. A dismissed employee is entitled to be reassigned to other duties that he or she is capable of performing and that are currently performed by a more recently hired employee. Since the employer also has the exclusive right to decide which qualities are required for a particular position, the actual qualifications of the individual employee turn out very important. In cases where the employer has changed these requirements, the deciding factor is often whether the employer has been offered the relevant training opportunities. Since employers have no strict legal obligation to train their staff in a redundancy situation, they are in a position to decide where redundancy occurs and whom it will affect. As a consequence, the dismissal order regulations provide limited protection against unfair dismissals due to alleged redundancy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-1090 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Pedersén, Benny |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Fakulteten för ekonomi, kommunikation och IT |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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