Employers can breathe a collective sigh of relief after the Advocate-General opinion on Woolworths, says Jessica Corsi
The Advocate-General has now given his opinion on a question which has been hotly debated among employment lawyers for a number of years: whether the UK is allowed to limit the obligation to consult with employee representatives about proposed redundancies to cases where the proposed redundancies (20 or more in a 90 day period) are at one establishment, or instead whether redundancies across all establishments count when determining whether the relevant threshold has been reached?
The Advocate-General concluded that UK law does comply with the Collective Redundancies Directive (the "Directive") and that the UK is allowed to limit collective redundancy consultation obligations to cases where the proposed redundancies are at the same establishment. What he didn’t determine is what an “establishment” is, and this may mean that the Advocate-General’s opinion is not all good news for employers.
Background
The issue came to the fore most recently in the case of USDAW v Ethel Austin and another (the Woolworths case) in which USDAW brought claims for protective awards after
