Capita: Listen up redundo staff, we know you're leaving but... The management team at Capita are all heart – they have asked staff being made redundant at a Glasgow call centre running O2’s phone support desk to prep newbies coming to the team. Some 700 workers – split evenly across centres in Bury and Glasgow – last week opted for voluntary redundancy, though according to the …
If you have the right sort of education and trainnig then there is a difference. IANAL so how would I know but having been in this situation myself there is some wierd legal description that makes it all right.(Not)
still I was gonna leave anyway so the £5k+ I got out of the men extra redundancy pay more than made up for it. any more and I would have had to pay tax on the redundancy.
"If there are 'replacements' then the roles are not redundant?"
Correct. But the work is being offshored [1], therefore the jobs of the people currently doing the work must go. There's a lot of it about, and there has been for a very long time (in IT terms). The Urban Dictionary's original reference to jobs being Bangalored dates back to 2003, and the process, and the term describing it, had already been around for a while. El Reg had a "My job went to India and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" item in 2004:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/09/ny_times_in_my_job/
Not sure what's new in this article, except more of the same.
What's perhaps new is companies like alleged leading hi-tech employer Rolls Royce (the jet engine one) offshoring important work to India and simultaneously seeking 2600 redundancies among hi-tech employees (designers, testers, etc) in the UK [2], which apparently rather upset the workforce although it's not been widely reported:
http://www.unitetheunion.org/news/rolls-royce-workers-give-backing-to-industrial-action-war-chest/
[1] From the article: "Top brass at Capita want to ensure as smooth a handover as possible as staff leave and newbies pick up the slack in the UK and on the South Africa service desk." which I read (in the context of call centre history) as meaning yet more UK jobs are being offshored to South Africa, for the usual reasons.
[2] http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/11/04/uk-rollsroyce-restructuring-idUKKBN0IO1CB20141104
"Without giving any explanation, Rolls also said Finance Director Mark Morris had left after 27 year with the company and would be replaced by David Smith, who is promoted from finance director of the Aerospace division."
David Smith was formerly CEO at Jaguar LandRover (owned by Indian company Tata). I wonder which company will be getting the outsourced work. Small world, eh.
This post has been deleted by its author
Been there, done that.
When the outsourcing company I worked for lost the contract to manage the IT at a call centre run by a large financial company we were asked by the clients to do the same.
When we queried this with our managers we were told. "Show them where the loos are and leave it at that." So we did.
Result: I heard that the place was in uproar, our replacements had a very shaky grasp of the English language (they were shipped in from India) had little or no idea where anything was or what it did, thanks to our instructions on minimal help on the handover and generally were struggling to understand a system that we had developed over five years and that we had polished to a fine art. We did leave documentation on everything and a disaster recovery plan etc. but as I said they had trouble speaking English fluently so how they got on with the sometimes cryptic documentation, which was in places more of an aide-memoir than full specs, I don't know.
Last I heard they were out and a new lot of perms had been installed. I would have felt sorry for them but as I lost my job over it I could not quite bring myself to do so. Though the £16000 I got as a payoff did help a little.
At my last job we were all made redundant after refusing the "opportunity" to relocate hundreds of miles with no no relocation package and no guarantee of a long term job (we'd been recruiting locally 3 months earlier and new recruits were told by the suits they had no plans of moving - so we didn't trust them).
We were then asked to _recruit_ _and_ train our replacements. We also caned them for PAYE after they tried to make the redundancy performance-related (which is taxable) - gross pay was scaled up so that net pay was as promised, but taxcodes being what they are we all got huge tax repayments at the end of the year. Bitter sweet - it was the most interesting job I've had.
As I understand it, 80% of the people we recruited had left within a year.
Futher proof as we all know that Crapita et al are contract management not service companies.
Tha 'A' Team turn up for the presentation, and promises prices so low they are effectively underbidding the actual costs, so the project is in deficit from Day 0.
The 'B' and 'C' teams and contractors arrive to do the actual job. They are driven into the ground and demoralised to meet the ridiculous targets. The quality drops, and as soon as the client starts to look elsewhere, form a queue for the Exit here.
Here's a thought if outsourcing is such a great solution, why doesn't Crapita et al outsource their legal, finance and HR depts and let the service guys run the company.
Remember the same thing happening at RBS. "Oh yes," said the luminaries, "let's sack all the experienced staff and get them to train a load of eager rookies in India,"
Then followed the longest and most disastrous outage in banking history. Connected?
Look forward to seeing Capita avoiding that oncoming juggernaut.
My former employer sent our jobs to India and also expected us to train our replacements. We also exhibited a staggering lack of commitment to that task, not least because our redundancies were involuntary.
There was lots of schadenfreude when the newbies were asked to shut down one data centre for maintenance and instead accidentally shut down every single datacentre, globally.
The estimated losses were far greater than the gain from losing all those years of experience and goodwill but, hey, they were cheaper...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
