TWU Wins Payouts for EX-G4S Members

• General News
• 2nd March 2012

The TWU’s decision to fight for redundancy pay for eligible employees who transferred their employment from G4S to Serco has paid off.

G4S ruled out redundancy payments after losing the state government court security and custodial services contract which went to Serco.

G4S lawyers applied to Fair Work Australia to reduce to ZERO the amount of redundancy they were required to pay.

The company had refused to transfer their employees accrued sick to Serco. And employees with less than seven years service were told they were not eligible for any pro-rata long service leave entitlements.

The TWU told them they were in the wrong, that redundancy was warranted and they should be coughing up.

Then, on November 9, as we were preparing to go to court, the G4S lawyers put a ‘Without Prejudice’ settlement proposal to the TWU.

They offered to pay 50% of the amount that employees would receive in a full redundancy situation.

Our lawyers considered the proposal carefully and recommended it should be accepted.

This recommendation was based on a professional understanding of the Fair Work Act’s redundancy provisions and previous related court decisions.

In making its decision whether G4S should pay redundancy and how much they should pay, we knew FWA would consider:

- Whether G4S assisted with helping their former employees ‘obtain’ employment with Serco. (We believe FWA was likely to find that G4S did play some role in its employees getting employment at Serco)

- Whether the work at Serco was similar to the work at G4S in terms of duties and conditions of employment. (We considered there is a reasonable chance that FWA would find that the employment at Serco is ‘suitable alternate employment’).

We therefore reasoned that it was unlikely that Fair Work Australia would order G4S to pay more than 50%. And it was possible they might order less than half.

So we conducted a secret ballot of eligible members and they voted by a two to one majority to accept the offer.

As we went to press steps were being taken to finalise the matter so that payments could be made ASAP.