Large Scale Redundancies - Election of Employee Reps

By Chris Coombes - 30 June 2020

“Let’s Talk About Reps…”

This month, Philip Cameron, Paul Quain, Chris Coombes and Elliott Lauder published a three-part series of articles focusing on the topic of employee representation in the workplace.

With the impending changes to the UK furlough scheme and employees beginning to return to work, you would be forgiven for thinking that employee representation shouldn’t sit particularly high on employers’ agendas at the moment.

However, the “Let’s talk about reps” series demonstrates why employers should be considering this issue now and how having a pre-existing employee forum in place can save a significant headache later in the year.

Our three-part series covers the following topics:

• “Do you need to elect employee representatives?” In this article, Philip Cameron looks at the circumstances in which employers may be legally required to consult with reps, particularly in a collective redundancy context. 
  
  
•  “How do you run an election for reps for information and consultation purposes?” For our second article, Paul Quain put together a handy flowchart to provide an overview of the election process, and outlines the key points to consider during an election. 
  
  
•  "Role of Reps and Special Protection" In our final article, Elliott Lauder and Chris Coombes wrote about what reps actually do in practice (including the issues they may need to consult about) and the particular value they possess in these Covid-times. This article also provides some guidance about the special legal protection employee reps benefit from. 

We hope this is helpful. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your usual GQ|Littler contact, email [email protected] or any of the contributors to this series. You can also click here for our introductory article.