The last negotiation meeting held before Christmas took place on the 22nd of December. Issues on the Recognition agreement were discussed, and dates were agreed for the negotiation meetings for January 2004.
Both parties also agreed that it was time to start thinking about setting a deadline to resolve the handful of outstanding issues and try to agree a settlement for the dispute. This will be discussed in the negotiation meeting to be held on the 16th January.
The first negotiation meeting after the Christmas holidays took place on the 7th January to discuss the Redundancy agreement. Many of the smaller issues and issues of clarity were resolved and the main issues will be discussed on the 16th January, once we have the reults of the survey that members were recently asked to complete. The company also reported on the progress of the new pay review (Reward) system and are now ready to start the 2004 pay negotiations within the next 2 weeks, as a separate negotiation from the current dispute negotiations.
The next negotiation meeting took place today (8th January). The main topic of discussion was the Recognition agreement, where we resolved some of the smaller issues and agreed that one of the major outstanding issues should be removed from the Recognition agreement and added into the Settlement agreement instead. The main outstanding issues on this now are in the Legal Status of parts of the agreement.
The next negotiation meeting will be on Friday 16th January and the Redundancy agreement will be the main topic for discussion.