Madam, - I would like to clarify a number of points in a Financial Times news service report carried in your edition of January 30th under the headline, "Protestants lodge unfair dismissal claims".
It is untrue that a change in our company's redundancy selection criteria during 2003 left "Protestants more likely to lose their jobs".
The change in the criteria ensured they continued to conform to Northern Ireland equal opportunities legislation and that the actual outcome in 2003, as with the two previous years, did not adversely affect any group of employees. The religious breakdown of our workforce was unaffected.
The article's claim that a "last in first out" (LIFO) policy is considered "best practice in most UK workplaces" is not the case. Anti-discrimination legislation specifically sets out to address this issue of under-representation of particular groups within a workforce and in particular circumstances LIFO can be found to be unlawful.
At no time has the AMICUS trade union representative quoted in the article, nor the union itself, relayed concerns to the company that the redundancy selection criteria used adversely affected any religious grouping. The actual outcome shows that this did not happen.
As for the claim that the company's recruitment intakes have included "a disproportionately large number of Catholics", the company, as required by Northern Ireland legislation, has worked to try and ensure that the percentage of Catholic job applicants reflects Catholic representation in the company's catchment area. The company has not yet achieved that equal opportunity objective. All recruitment selection is on the basis of merit.
Equality legislation places a duty on every company continually to review all its employment policies and practices. Our company has striven to ensure that these, and in particular our redundancy criteria, conform to all current equality legislation. The increase in the number of unfair dismissal applications in 2003 arose from the number of redundancies we were forced to make as a result of the global economic conditions faced by our industry. Despite claims in the article, it is impossible to say to which religious denomination those applicants belong. In practice in the past, only a small proportion of unfair dismissal applications against the company have actually gone to tribunal. The company will be strongly contesting any such applications, as we believe the criteria used for redundancy selection have been fair and impartial.
Finally, the photograph accompanying the article was not of our employees as captioned, but those of another company. - Yours, etc.,
ALEC McRITCHIE, Director, Communications and Public Affairs, Europe, Bombardier Aerospace, Belfast 3.