Eversheds International

Food

Human resources

Managing your workforce

Eversheds has the largest and the most regarded employment law group in the UK. The 150+ strong team has detailed food sector experience in all areas of contentious and non contentious employment law.

As well as the legal challenges faced by all large employers, the food sector also faces a number of issues including:

recruitment and retention issues
maintaining high management standards throughout multi-site operations
immigration issues
national minimum wage requirements
special employment laws relating to warehousing and distribution staff
age discrimination laws
working time and Sunday working regulations.

We have extensive experience of advising on diverse and multi-cultural working within the food sector, and have co-contributed to the guidance document entitlement "Working safely in a multicultural food and drink industry".

Food manufacturers, distributors and retailers have had to adapt to new legislation. Moreover, obligations, particularly in diversity and equality legislation, extend beyond employees to include customers, who have significant and increasing rights.

With food manufacturers, distributors and retailers increasingly expanding their markets and operating across jurisdictions, ensuring the right culture and standards of performance and conduct is critical to success; and this must be achieved whilst complying with local laws.

With the depth of expertise we have in the food sector we can assist you by providing:

a fixed fee telephone helpline - The helpline is designed to meet your requirement for relatively routine issues that can be handled within the confines of a telephone call or a short written response. The helpline is offered at a fixed price providing costs certainty but also ensuring your team is never discouraged from picking up a phone for fear that a lawyer's clock is ticking.

The key features of your helpline will be:
- 24/7 access
- agreed response time
- service delivery by a dedicated client service team
- price certainty.
fixed fee employment tribunals - Depending on the number of cases you receive each year, employment tribunals can be dealt with at a fixed cost from £3,000 plus VAT from start to finish no matter how long or how short the case is. All members of our team have extensive experience of employment tribunal representation.
training - We can put at your disposal dedicated trainers who use the latest and most effective techniques. We can provide bespoke training seminars and workshops and work with you to identify your training and provide bespoke training courses tailored specifically to your needs.

Examples of our recent experience include:

advising large food manufacturer on closure of a major site and relocation to new premises involving over 300 redundancies
advising food manufacturer on the dismissal of a number of employees seeking to blackmail company by sabotaging products; conducted detailed and secretive investigation involving police and the Food Standards Agency
advising manufacturer of food products on asylum and immigration consents, international secondments and illegal employment
providing legal and strategic advice to a food manufacturer faced with a long standing industrial dispute; this included advice on picketing, managing industrial action and resolving a pay dispute
advising a food manufacturing company on a major restructuring and change programme to include advice on consultation issues with individuals and collectively.