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I’ve been working at a company for more than 10 years, and it has been a great journey. It’s been like a family to us all. Recent changes made things less enjoyable, but I was coping until I discovered in the news that our business had been sold! Nobody had told us about this. I was infuriated, and I emailed senior people, wanting an explanation. One of them replied, having a go at me and saying my tone was inappropriate.
Am I right in asking for more details on the sale of the business? Am I right to be annoyed by the lack of communication and the verbal abuse I’ve been given? What are my rights as an employee in this situation?
Your employer may not have a legal responsibility to tell you about the sale of the business, but it’s clear they may not value you appropriately.Credit: John Shakespeare
What a shock this must have been. Yes, I think you have every right to be annoyed. Management should be far more concerned with the tenor of their communication than the tone of yours.
But that’s just my lay opinion. I asked Dr Stephen Clibborn from the University of Sydney to give us the benefit of his experience and expertise. He’s an associate professor in the discipline of work and organisational studies at the university’s business school and co-director of the Sydney Employment Relations Research Group (SERRG).
He told me we might consider this case from three main perspectives: legal, people management and business management.
“The general legal principle is that a business doesn’t own its workers like it owns assets,” he said. “Despite employers commonly saying that their most valuable assets are their workers, employees are not actually business assets. Therefore, an employee can’t be transferred from one employer to another without that employee’s agreement.
“So if the business in this case was sold to another organisation, it is unlikely that sale included the sale of its employees without each employees’ agreement. However, if this did happen, it may have triggered redundancy rights for the employees.
It is possible that the new owners see the value of the business they have acquired in something other than its workers.
Dr Stephen Clibborn, University of Sydney
“What I suspect has happened here is that the company employing the reader was sold. If this is the case, the reader would still be employed by the same legal entity – the company. In a strict legal sense, nothing has changed in their employment relationship – their employer remains the same, their accrued entitlements remain, etcetera. It is just a change in shareholding of the company that employs them.”