Thomas Cook: Former staff prepare legal action against failed firm over redundancy process

More than 100 ex-employees will seek additional redundancy compensation, usually awarded if staff weren’t consulted before being let go

(AFP/Getty)

More than 100 former Thomas Cook employees are preparing to launch legal action against the collapsed travel firm over the way they lost their jobs.

Law firm Simpson Millar has said it has been approached by the former workers to secure what is known as a protective award, which can total up to £4,200 minus taxes per person. A protective award is additional redundancy compensation ordered by an employment tribunal if the staff weren’t consulted by their employer before being let go.

Although there is no guarantee the claims will be successful, they are “worth bringing”, says Richard Linskell, employment partner at law firm Gunnercooke.

“In this case, there’s an argument that the management knew about the insolvency in advance,” he adds.

“Whether they knew about it long enough in advance to consult on redundancies is another matter. They were trying very hard to avoid the insolvency but that does not preclude them consulting at the same time.”

Simpson Millar gave the example of one ex-employee who found out she had lost her job from a generic email at 1am on Monday morning.

“We knew there were difficulties earlier in the year, but they were played down internally,” Claire Hoang from Stalybridge in Manchester was quoted as saying.

In other cases, former Thomas Cook workers did not even receive the email and instead learnt of their fate via the news, the law firm said.

Ex-employees can claim a protective award only if they were made redundant alongside at least 19 other people at the same place of work. That would exclude people from smaller Thomas Cook stores.

The compensation is separate from basic redundancy pay and wages and benefits owed, but both are paid by the government’s Insolvency Service if the employer has gone under.

According to the latest figures from the Insolvency Service, 6,002 out of 9,041 Thomas Cook employees in the UK have been made redundant since the firm collapsed on Monday.