‘Bumping’ is where an employee whose job is redundant ‘bumps’ another employee out of their job, so the employee who was ‘bumped’ is the one who is actually made redundant. This often happens when a more senior member of staff is prepared to take a junior role to avoid redundancy.
We have seen this is a recent case in the Employment Appeal Tribunal (“EAT”). In Contract Bottling Ltd v Cave, the EAT confirmed that an employee may be dismissed for redundancy where the employee's own job remains, but the need reduces for the business to have different kinds of employee.
In the above case, the claimants worked in the employer's accounts department and were dismissed after a redundancy exercise in which a group of staff with diverse functions were put in a 'rather surprising' pool, with the lowest scoring four staff dismissed regardless of job function. The remaining staff were retrained to fill gaps, even if it would have meant retraining a warehouse manager in accounting. The original tribunal rejected redundancy as the reason for the dismissals.
In this case, the EAT held that the dismissals were for redundancy and were a form of 'bumping'. Employment Associate, Paul Burton, says "The EAT said that a 'diminution in the requirement of the business for work of a particular kind' can be met in respect of several kinds of work, not just individual kinds of work. Many employers do question whether ‘bumping’ can be used in a redundancy situation. Although care has to be exercised when doing so, this case confirms that it can be done."
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