After a takeover, removing a role requires more than a new organisation chart.
Picture the first Monday after an acquisition. The new owner wants one central management team. Local managers will lose duties, administration will move to head office, and payroll should eventually become leaner. On paper, the change looks orderly. Around the table, it feels less so. Someone must tell an employee that the new structure has no place for their role.
The current UWV framework for business-economic dismissal brings the real question into focus. An employer must explain why work disappears structurally, why dismissal is necessary, how the dismissal sequence was determined, and why suitable redeployment is unavailable. Training may form part of that assessment.
That turns an attractive acquisition slide into a demanding employment question. Did the work disappear, or did it merely move to someone else?
The organisation chart is only the beginning
Centralisation can be a rational business choice. A buyer may combine HR, marketing, maintenance, finance or management across several locations. UWV’s July 2025 rules recognise that an acquiring employer may have independent organisational reasons to combine departments after a transfer of undertaking.
Employees cannot be dismissed because a business transfers. An independently justified economic, technological or organisational change may support dismissal when the statutory conditions are met. A share transaction is not automatically a transfer of undertaking either. The transaction and the operating reality determine the legal route.
For a small employer, the practical difficulty lies elsewhere. Work rarely vanishes as neatly as a box disappearing from a chart. A director’s tasks may be divided between a regional manager, a finance employee and the owner. A local manager may lose authority while still handling staff problems, suppliers and weekly planning.
I read this as a test of managerial honesty. The employer must describe what stopped, what moved and what remained. If nobody can do that without changing the story halfway through the conversation, the reorganisation was probably not ready for an employment decision.
Titles carry less weight than daily work
Dutch dismissal rules require employers to identify categories of interchangeable functions when determining the dismissal sequence. UWV looks beyond job titles. Function content, required knowledge, skills, level, pay and the temporary or structural nature of the work all matter.
That is where ordinary business records gain importance. Job descriptions are useful, but so are signing powers, reporting lines, salary levels, access rights and the actual division of responsibility. Recruitment messages may matter too. A company that says one management role disappeared while advertising similar duties under a fresher title creates an obvious question.
Return to our Monday morning meeting. The buyer calls one employee a director and another a manager. That difference sounds clear until both approve rosters, negotiate with suppliers and supervise the same team. Similar titles can also hide different authority, expertise and accountability. Labels do not settle the comparison.
HR should not work alone. Finance knows where costs moved. Payroll knows which employment terms changed. Operations knows who performs the tasks. The owner knows the intended model. Their accounts should describe the same company.
Redeployment follows the real group
A disappearing role does not end the assessment. The employer must examine suitable redeployment within a reasonable period. Under the Ontslagregeling, that review includes current vacancies, roles expected to open and certain positions occupied by temporary staff, agency workers, on-call workers, seconded workers and contractors, subject to the statutory conditions.
Where the employer belongs to a group, suitable roles in other group companies must also be considered. Suitability depends on the employee’s education, experience and capacities. The search cannot stop at the payroll company merely because that boundary is administratively convenient.
This has particular force after centralisation. Moving work into a shared team may widen the practical area in which suitable roles need examination. The same acquisition intended to remove duplication can reveal vacancies elsewhere in the group.
Timing also deserves care. Employees are generally protected against dismissal during the first two years of illness. Rijksoverheid explains that this prohibition normally does not block dismissal when illness begins after the UWV application. That exception does not decide whether the business-economic ground itself is sound. It shows why dates, decisions and communications must form one coherent chronology.
The saving must survive the full calculation
Owners often calculate the annual salary saving first. I would start with a wider figure. Notice-period wages, transition compensation, advice, training, recruitment and possible litigation all affect cash. So does management time spent reconstructing decisions that were never properly recorded.
UWV guidance also states that if the former work becomes vacant within 26 weeks, the employer may have to give the dismissed employee an opportunity to return. The months after dismissal therefore remain part of the reorganisation story. Later recruitment should reflect the operating model the company previously presented.
A sensible internal review can stay concrete. Draw the organisation before and after the change. Write down who approved it and why. Match each removed responsibility to its destination. Compare actual duties rather than titles. Review vacancies across the relevant group. Then reconcile that picture with payroll, budgets, recruitment and signing authority.
Those steps do not decide an individual legal case. They do something equally valuable for leadership. They expose contradictions before an employee, UWV or court has to find them.
The human conversation on Monday morning will still be difficult. A careful record will not make job loss painless. It can ensure that the employer speaks plainly, understands its own decision and has budgeted for its consequences. After a takeover, that is not paperwork around the reorganisation. It is part of whether the reorganisation is real.
If a post-acquisition reorganisation is taking shape, align the operating model, employment analysis and financial consequences before decisions are communicated.
The data, sourcing, and analysis behind this article were conducted by Linda Pavan Geraedts. AI was not used to identify sources, build the factual basis, or produce the analytical judgment contained here. AI was used only as a drafting aid. The final English text was personally reviewed, edited, and approved by Linda Pavan Geraedts before publication.
References
- Ontslag om bedrijfseconomische redenen - geen herstel arbeidsovereenkomst · Salaris Vanmorgen
- UWV - Core test for business-economic dismissal
- UWV - Comparable functions and dismissal sequence
- Wettenbank - Redeployment within the undertaking and group
- UWV - Acquisition, transfer of undertaking, and post-acquisition reorganisation
- Rijksoverheid - Illness after the UWV application
- Rijksoverheid - Judicial review following a UWV route
- Wettenbank
