700 take Tesco redundancy

Just a few days after 1,000 long-serving staff voted for strike action over management plans to place them on inferior contracts, the company has claimed 700 have accepted a voluntary redundancy package.

Last January, Tesco management announced plans to move all its pre-1996 staff onto a “modern contract”. It said the pre-1996 contract meant it had too many staff working during the early quieter times of the week and not enough during the busiest. It offered staff who moved to new contracts compensation.

Then it opened up a voluntary redundancy scheme offering five weeks per year of service uncapped. For those who did not take voluntary redundancy, it said it would pay compensation of 2.5 times their annual loss of income.