ECJ Ruling On Collective Redundancy Consultation

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has today confirmed in the 'Woolworths' case that, when counting the number of redundant employees across multiple sites for the purposes of collective redundancy consultation, each of the employer's establishments (in this case shops) must be looked at separately. The effect of the ruling is that only employees in the larger shops were entitled to be consulted collectively. Hence the ECJ has confirmed that it is not necessary to amalgamate redundancy numbers across all the employer's establishments (which would mean that the 20 employee threshold was much more easily reached and that collective consultation would be required in far more cases).

Following our report on the opinion of the Advocate General in the ECJ in the case (USDAW and anor v WW Realisation 1 Ltd (in liquidation) in February, the ECJ has, as we expected, followed the Advocate General's opinion in reaching its decision.