The company has come up with an extra date for negotiations, and we've now proposed a timetable to them for concluding an agreement. The main points in our proposal are:
Week beginning 2nd Feb
* More work on uncontroversial aspects of drafts
* Thursday 5 Feb: Negotiations to get drafts fit to circulate except for major outstanding issues. Prepare clear definition of outstanding issues.
* Circulate drafts and list of outstanding issues to staff
Week beginning 9 Feb
* Tuesday 10 Feb: EGM covering our negotiations, pay claim, pensions
* Wednesday 11 Feb: Negotiations on the major outstanding issues. Also deal with any issues/comments raised by members in response to the circulation of drafts and the EGM. Produce formal offer from the company.
* Circulate offer to members, with electronic voting
Week beginning 16 Feb
* Monday/Tuesday: Surgeries for employees to ask reps questions etc about the offer
* Wednesday 18 Feb - voting closes
* Sign agreement, or get together to work out how to respond to its rejection
This isn't yet all agreed, but the negotiation dates are fixed. Good (but time-consuming) progress continues on the draft agreements.
Thursday and Friday were spent on a "walkthrough" of the draft agreements, to make sure people who hadn't been involved in the negotiations could understand them, to spot any mistakes, and to check that no points had been missed out from earlier versions.
To our disappointment, this proved quite fruitful. However, the checking did not throw up any major issues.
All the comments have been collected together, and we hope to incorporate or reject them over the next week.
We're still hopeful that a well-crafted "offer" can be circulated to members in the next few weeks.
Another day of negotiations today, and more progress made.
Today's talks concentrated on two of the three draft agreements - the "settlement" document and the union recognition agreement.
A big thankyou to the (over 100) members who completed our survey. This has already proved useful in the negotiations. We'll be holding the prize draw in the next few days.
There are still a few significant unresolved issues, but agreement does seem possible.
We also discussed a timetable for completing the negotiations.
We'll be having a "walkthrough" of the draft agreements on 22-23 January, to check they're comprehensible to reps and HR people who haven't been directly involved in the negotiations, and to identify any points which have been accidentally missed out during the editing process.
We hope to circulate draft agreements to members, and then hold an Extraordinary General Meeting during the week beginning 2nd February. We'd then collate comments from members, make any final changes, and put the company's offer to a vote of members so that it could be signed by 20 February.
Last Friday (16th Jan) we had negotiations which covered all the dispute documentation. We spent a good deal of time on clarifying, rewording and resolving the smaller issues, and updating the documents on-line within the meeting. Good progress was made and the list of outstanding issues is now down to a handful of larger issues.
We reported back on the progress of the survery of members' contracts (which closed on the 16th Jan) and gave some initial feedback. We are intending to analyse the full results and present them to the company at the next negotiation meeting on Wednesday, for discussion.
We also suggested providing a timetable and list of tasks that need to be achieved to bring the negotiations to a close and to aim to settle the dispute.
We have produced a first draft of this and sent it to the company and are now awaiting their response.
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.