Constructive dismissal

[hannahb71]

So long story short, been with same company over 11 years,
was bought over by new company, new manager takes over, always been praised and had excellent feed back for the job I have always done, now feel bullied and intimidated, new people he employed get all new equipment, I get the old stuff lying in storeroom, told I will need to work my hours round the new people as they have requested the hours I have always done, gave me a one to one in front of another 3 members of staff to which he criticised and belittled me, spoke to HR who said she would have a word with him, which made things even worse, wasn’t involved in any meetings, training etc, when I was invited to one meeting, which I explained I couldn’t give him an acceptance yet as I was waiting on an important appointment, he pushed and pushed till I had no choice but to email back and say the reason I couldn’t comit as I had to go for a breast scan, to which he copied this email to all the people invited to the meeting, I was absolutely livid, I challenged him and he said the people at the meeting had a right to be in the loop, I spoke to HR and said I wanted a formal complaint made against him, to which she said he hadn’t really done anything wrong and intimated if I took it further they could make things very difficult for me, few days later I handed my notice in and to make things worse they found something on my breast scan that needed further investigation, feel I have been totally bullied out a job I have done for over 11 years, any advice greatly appreciated.

[ULA]

Sorry to hear about your situation and current health concern.

Constructive unfair dismissal which is the legal terms is defined as where an employer has committed a serious breach of contract, entitling the employee to resign in response to the employer’s conduct.

It can be difficult to prove constructive dismissal. The onus will be on you to prove a fundamental (rather than minor) breach of contract by the employer and you must also show that your decision to terminate your employment was in response to that breach. An employment tribunal will also need to satisfy itself that you did not delay too long in handing in your notice, which it appears from what you have said you did not. In addition, it will usually expect to see that you have tried to resolve the complaint through the grievance procedure before resigning.

It does not mean that you cannot try to bring such claim, if you genuinely believe and can prove that you terminated your employment by means of constructive unfair dismissal but you will have to have strong evidence to support such a claim. You may want to start by setting yourself out a chronology of events where you feel that the company fundamentally breached the contract of employment as these are the facts that you would need to be proving.

If you do want to make a claim then you need to start the process no later than 3 months less a day from when your employment ends. This is done by staring Early Conciliation via ACAS.

I hope this has helped but it may also have led to you having more questions which if so please just come back to this thread.