This afternoon's Extraordinary General Meeting passed the following motion without a single vote against:
This group rejects the company offer as it now stands. We will begin industrial action as planned on Monday 15th September, and continue negotiations.
We instruct our reps to stop the action if the company makes an offer that members indicate they wish to accept, or if that decision is made by a further General Meeting.
We recognise that the agreements have been drafted in haste, and instruct our reps to work with the company to improve the agreements, and seek our approval for a revised version.
This means that the industrial action planned for Monday will go ahead.
The meeting recognised that the offer was substantially better than the one considered last week. However, we identified ten key points where the offer from the company was still so seriously flawed that it was unacceptable:
1) Restricting the right to individual representation to certain types of meetings (worse than our current union recognition agreement)
2) Allowing the company to unilaterally make "exceptions" from the Individual Grievance procedure (worse than our current union recognition agreement)
3) Allowing the company to implement decisions before hearing individual grievances (worse than our current union recognition agreement)
4) Restricting collective consultation to redundancies, rather than redeployments and reorganisations, as required by the existing Security of Employment Agreement (SEA)
5) Stopping collective consultation where less than 11 people were to be made redundant (worse than the existing SEA)
6) Giving no guarantee on 90-day redundancy consultation periods for those earning over £35,836 (unlike SEA or past practice)
7) No offer on pay
8) An inaccurate definition of who was covered by the SEA, which would threaten the redundancy terms of many members
9) Changed wording on Pay In Lieu Of Notice (PILON) that allows the company to dismiss members without notice
10) Banning the use of the individual grievance procedure in relation to redundancy, but not adequately defining the alternative appeal process
Amicus is calling on all Fujitsu Services employees based at West Gorton (including home workers with a MAN05 admin base) to strike on Monday 15th September. Action short of strike starts on this day too.
WHAT ABOUT NON-MEMBERS?
Non union members can take part in the industrial action. They have the same legal protection as members - they cannot be dismissed for taking part in lawful industrial action. To offer them further reassurance, the EGM agreed that we would defend non-members who joined in. If they support what we're fighting for, they should support our action.
Posted by IA at September 11, 2003 07:59 PM