My solicitor asked me to find out what happened to the other eight people after they declined the offer. We compared dates, letters, restructuring notices, and redundancy amounts, and the pattern was impossible to miss. Every one of us had been offered the same package, every one of us had declined it, and every one of our roles became “redundant” within weeks. Then we learned something even worse: younger employees in the same division had been moved into newly created positions instead of being included in the restructuring. The company had called it voluntary because they wanted a record showing that we had been given the chance to leave first. My solicitor said that wording mattered because it could completely change how the later redundancies were viewed.
She requested the internal documents showing who had been selected for the voluntary package and why. The company fought the request for nearly two months, then finally produced a spreadsheet with two columns I had never seen. One was age, and the other was “retirement proximity.” Every person on the voluntary list was within seven years of retirement. None of the younger employees had those columns filled in because they hadn’t been considered for the offer. Then we found an email from a director saying they wanted to “reduce long-service liabilities” before the restructuring was announced. My solicitor read it twice and simply said, “Don’t sign anything yet.”
The nine of us filed together, and the company suddenly became very interested in settling. They increased my redundancy payment to cover the notice period, restored several benefits, and agreed to remove the voluntary-offer language from my personnel record. The other eight received similar adjustments, and the company later announced an internal review of how the restructuring had been handled. I never expected the nine of us comparing paperwork in a car park to turn into something that big. But the numbers were there, and the dates were there, and the company had put both of them in writing. They called the offer voluntary because they wanted us to leave quietly; what they didn’t expect was nine people over fifty-five comparing notes and discovering we’d all been given the same exit plan.
