How to cope with redundancy

It doesn't matter what newspaper, magazine or website you read, in most cases, readers are faced with a gloomy analysis of the British economy and with the recent unanticipated news that we are still in recession redundancy is unfortunately still not an issue we can forget about

What does this mean for employees?

While we have seen some 'green shoots' of recovery in the past months, unemployment is likely to increase over the next year (particularly once the squeeze on public sector spending comes into play).

This means that further redundancies are an inevitable reality, which employees should be prepared for, particularly if they work in an industry/service that has suffered a dramatic downturn.

ACAS (a service helping to prevent and resolve employment disputes) has recently published its annual report for 2008/09. The statistics in its report suggest a considerable increase in unfair dismissal claims of around 30 per cent and also an increase of 36 per cent in redundancy pay claims, suggesting that employers are not approaching redundancies in a fair and transparent way and may be cutting corners in order to save costs.

Redundancies are bad news for everyone but if you are armed with the correct advice and information, they needn't be as stressful and daunting as they can first appear.