At the end of last year, I was offered a promotion. I accepted it and a meeting was held with my new team to, I believed, announce that I would soon be promoted. I had not yet signed an employment agreement for the new role, so I didn’t expect to start in the role immediately. To my shock, my new team was told that I would be their manger effective immediately. I wasn’t happy with this, but was assured the contract would be formalised quickly.
After the meeting took place, an email was sent by my manager to the entire department, informing around 60 people of my new role. At the end of the week, I updated my LinkedIn with the new role, which the CTO publicly commented on offering congratulations. The following week, HR updated my role in our email and HR systems. Two weeks later, I received a draft job description to review. But I still had yet to receive the contract or pay rise. Note that I have evidence of all these things.
For the next six months, I kept chasing the updated employee agreement and pay rise, but kept being given excuses and told that it was being worked on. About three months ago, I started working my contracted hours to the minute, and nothing more. When my boss told me some other managers noticed I wasn’t putting in the extra effort, I explained that I wasn’t going to work unpaid overtime; until I receive my updated employee agreement and pay rise, I do not consider myself as being paid for the hours I am contracted to work.
I raised it again last month and demanded the updated employment agreement and pay rise by the end of May and, if it wasn’t done, I would start looking for work elsewhere. The first of June came and no contact was given.
I requested a full interim reference at the end of last year, but HR never completed this. Therefore, I requested that this be completed and a new partial reference be completed, making clear that I wanted it to reflect that I have spent the last six months working in a new role.
A few days later, I received the full interim reference, but the partial reference did not list my new role. HR advised me that they could not list the new role until an employment agreement was signed. I spoke to my boss about this and he said he needed to talk to the CTO. I then had a meeting with my boss and the CTO, where the CTO stated that he would not authorise a new employee agreement at this time as he was still confident he could secure the pay rise and contract as I had requested. A few recruiters I have spoken to have explained that, without a reference that matches my CV ... well ... it doesn’t look good to potential employers!
I’ve had a look at the law regarding labour disputes and saw that you can request a conciliatory meeting or arbitration, supervised by the relevant cantonal labour court, to resolve labour disputes. Then problem is that, while the lack of an accurate reference hinders my job search, I’m not sure if I can make monetary claims for this. I have read that, in matters related to inaccurate references, it’s accepted that a monetary claim of a month‘s income can be made, but I am still employed, so I am not sure this applies in my case.
I’ve had a search online for similar cases to mine, but haven’t been successful in finding anything. I plan to contact a lawyer about this, but thought I would check here first as calling a lawyer will likely incur costs.
So ... anyone able to advise me on what I might do next?