Yesterday's negotiations with the company continued to make good progress in a number of areas. Though there remains some detailed work to be done in several areas, it appears that there is just one major sticking point, concerning the redundancy terms for around 75% of the 290 staff in the bargaining unit who joined the company since 31st December 1998. If you joined the company since then, it's particularly important that you:
a) Attend Tuesday's Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM)
b) Try to find your contract of employment (and your VR quote if you had one last year), so that you are ready to respond to our survey when it comes out
Remember, the EGM is for all Amicus members employed by Fujitsu Services and based at West Gorton, including those who are home-based with a West Gorton admin base.
EGM
3pm-4:30pm
Tuesday 2nd December
MAN05 restaurant
If your manager will need to arrange cover for you to attend, please inform them straight away.
If you have any difficulty getting release for this meeting, please contact your rep promptly.
Don't leave it until the last minute!
The EGM will allow you to hear a report from the negotiating team, to ask questions, and make sure you understand how the all the issues affect you. The meeting will then decide on next steps. Please do your best to attend.
Negotiations continue today. Most of the time will be spent on other issues - in the meantime we have asked the company to reconsider their position on the redundancy terms for newer staff.
Yesterday's negotiations with the company continued to make good progress in a number of areas. Though there remains some detailed work to be done in several areas, it appears that there is just one major sticking point, concerning the redundancy terms for around 75% of the 290 staff in the bargaining unit who joined the company since 31st December 1998. If you joined the company since then, it's particularly important that you:
a) Attend Tuesday's Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM)
b) Try to find your contract of employment (and your VR quote if you had one last year), so that you are ready to respond to our survey when it comes out
Remember, the EGM is for all Amicus members employed by Fujitsu Services and based at West Gorton, including those who are home-based with a West Gorton admin base.
EGM
3pm-4:30pm
Tuesday 2nd December
MAN05 restaurant
If your manager will need to arrange cover for you to attend, please inform them straight away.
If you have any difficulty getting release for this meeting, please contact your rep promptly.
Don't leave it until the last minute!
The EGM will allow you to hear a report from the negotiating team, to ask questions, and make sure you understand how the all the issues affect you. The meeting will then decide on next steps. Please do your best to attend.
Negotiations continue today. Most of the time will be spent on other issues - in the meantime we have asked the company to reconsider their position on the redundancy terms for newer staff.
Negotiations with the company continue tomorrow and Friday.
We are holding an Extraordinary General Meeting:
3pm-4:30pm
Tuesday 2nd December
MAN05 restaurant
This meeting is for:
All Amicus members working for Fujitsu Services and who are based at MAN05, or who are based at HOM99 with a MAN05 admin base.
The negotiating team will report to the meeting on progress in the talks, and members will decide on the next steps to be taken. Please book it in your diary now and do your best to attend.
If your manager will need to arrange cover for you to attend, please inform them straight away.
If you have any difficulty getting release for this meeting, please contact your rep promptly.
Many members, particularly those in Fujitsu Consulting, believe that Fujitsu Consulting and Fujitsu Services are likely to be combined. While many employees, including reps on the European Consultative Forum (now the Fujitsu Services Consultative Forum) failed to see the sense in splitting ICL in two, any re-merger obviously raises issues of concern for employees. In particular, will there be any overlap of job functions between the two organisations? Fujitsu Consulting staff are all too used to job losses, having spent much of the last two years "on 90 days".
Whatever the future holds, building a strong union offers the best protection we can get.
Consultation over the future of the pension scheme continues, but we still don't know what the company's financial objectives are. We are exploring an idea from the reps to save money on the scheme without reducing benefits. Ideas like this are evidence of the value of consultation. We'll circulate more details in the coming days.
A new "ready-reckoner" has been put on the "Pensions Consultation" community on CafeVIK to help individuals assess the impact of proposed changes on them. Many thanks to our UKPCF reps for producing this!
The ready-reckoner is here.
When thinking about what (if any) changes you'd accept, don't just think about how it would affect you, today. The overall scheme has to be fair and balanced, and any changes should be acceptable to everyone. If one group of members is pitted against another, the company can get away with far more than if we all stand together.
The TUC have calculated that UK employees work unpaid overtime worth an average of £4,500 a year. The total comes to £23 billion a year. It's not just a matter of the money. How many people could be employed to do that work if we weren't doing it for free? How many years early will we die as a result of working excessive hours? If the work is being done for free, employers have little incentive to manage the business to avoid excessive hours.
As part of their campaign against Britain's long working hours, the TUC have launched an online "calculator" for you to work out the value of your unpaid overtime.
http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/tuc-7317-f0.cfm
The Amicus Greater Manchester IT Branch will be holding its Annual General Meeting:
6pm-7:30pm, Thursday 4th December
Upstairs, Hare & Hounds pub, Shudehill, Manchester City Centre, M4 4AA
All branch members are entitled to attend and are very welcome.
As well as the normal business, the meeting will elect the branch officers for the coming year.
Voting papers for the new Amicus National Executive Council (NEC) are now out. If you haven't received your ballot paper yet, NOW is the time to complain.
We encourage all members to use their votes - this election will shape the future of our union. Votes must be received by 5th December, so don't hang about.
All members are entitled to vote in the regional election (your region is determined by which branch you are in, not where you live or work). Members in the Greater Manchester IT Branch will be in the North-West region.
All members except retired, honorary and student members also get votes for seats for their industrial sector, and for the four seats reserved for women. Fujitsu Services and Fujitsu Consulting employees will be in the "Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Information Technology" industrial sector, for which there are two seats.
A list of nominations for the regional and women's seats is here: http://www.amicus-m.org/nominees.shtml
A list of candidates for the industrial seats is here: http://www.aeeu.org.uk/NEC_Elections/INDUSTRIAL%20CANDIDATES.htm
For more information on the NEC elections, see the national union web site:
http://www.amicus-m.org.uk/necelections2004.shtml
Negotiations have continued to make progress since our last General Meeting. There are still details to sort out in a number of areas, but there are three main issues which are taking up the majority of the time:
a) Redundancy terms for the 290 staff who joined since the start of 1999. The company is checking individual contract terms to assess the cost of various alternatives.
b) We've completely re-structured the draft redundancy agreement, to reflect the various steps in the process. Our goal with this is to clarify what has to be done when jobs are at risk, when people are at risk of dismissal, when people have been selected etc. We have too much experience of bad managers trying to "work around" people's rights.
c) We haven't yet come to an agreement about which parts of both the Recognition agreement and Redundancy Annex should be legally binding (contractual). The company have now said that "the parts of the Redundancy Annex that are "entitlements" (e.g. severance payments, trial periods for redeployment) can be legally binding, but not the Redundancy "processes". We are hoping to define which parts of the agreements can be made legally binding in the meetings later this week.
At the last EGM, frustration was expressed that progress wasn't as fast as it should be. The negotiating team believes that the company is now showing more commitment to the process and that the current delays are for genuine reasons.
Your reps are not intending to call the next EGM for this week, as originally planned, as further talks are scheduled for Thursday and Friday this week. We have yet to confirm the date, but Tuesday 2nd December seems likely.
Members who will be covered by the agreement (i.e. MAN05 and home based staff) should remember that we will soon be issuing our survey, to help your negotiators deal with some of the final, complex, issues around redundancy and union recognition. It's in your interests to complete this survey to ensure that your needs are fully understood and taken into account. To prepare for the survey, we recommend that you try to find a copy of your contract of employment. If you got a quote for voluntary redundancy last year we recommend you find that too. These documents will help you answer the questions.
Don't forget that updates on the dispute are posted to our dispute web page:
http://www.ourunion.org.uk/icl/FJSdispute
Talks were held this afternoon to discuss the latest version of the Recognition agreement. The agreement has now been re-issued with the latest comments incorporated and is now being circulated for comments around the relevant people in both parties.
Also, the latest Pay Statement was discussed and we are now waiting on an update from the Company on some of the comments that they are drafting to be included in this statement.
Talks continue tomorrow on the Redundancy Annex to discuss the principle issues still outstanding and on improving the structure and content of the document itself.
Further progress was made in talks yesterday.
A series of actions were agreed by the two parties to improve the draft agreements and to try to find a way forward on one or two key sticking points in the redundancy document.
Drafts and information will be exchanged over the coming week.
Further talks are planned from Wednesday 19th November, focussing on the new union recognition agreement. Talks are also planned for Thursday 20th (focussing on redundancy again), and for Friday 21st.
Today's members' meeting heard a report from Lynne Hodge, who is leading the negotiations for Amicus, and had a lengthy discussion on the current drafts of the settlement documents.
The meeting heard that reps plan to conduct a survey of members to identify who is affected by particular issues, so that their detailed views can be taken into account.
The company had further extended the "protected period" for industrial action to allow more time for talks. Negotiations are due to continue tomorrow.
The meeting unanimously passed the following motion:
MOTION
We note the gradual progress being made in the negotiations. Many of the issues of detail and drafting have now been resolved.
We note the following key points where the company is still trying to worsen the treatment of staff compared to past policy or practice:
1) That the company is retrospectively claiming that employees whose contracts state they are covered by the "current policy" on redundancy would get the new "minimum" severance terms. At no point had the company notified employees or Amicus of any change from the old policy of the Security of Employment Agreement and M-grade package. This would dramatically reduce the value of redundancy packages for many members.
2) That the company is refusing to confirm that MAN05 staff outside the collective bargaining unit will continue to get 90-days consultation for potential redundancy, or to say which of them will continue to benefit from SEA severance terms.
3) Whereas during the 2002 redundancies, the company repeatedly referred to people's "contractual" redundancy terms, the company is unwilling to make the new redundancy arrangements contractual.
We are concerned by the company's draft wording on pay:
1) The company seems to be trying to claim that low pay is a result of poor individual performance, rather than the company's current pay system
2) The commitments are based on next year's pay scales, which don't yet exist, and there is no assurance that these will be broadly in line with the current ones (i.e. that the benchmarks won't be lowered)
3) The commitment to part of the available funds being used for an "across the board" pay rise is being watered down with exceptions. Differences in performance and current pay can be dealt with using the remainder of the funds.
4) There is not even a broad commitment to how much of the funds available next year would be used to address the issues identified in the company statement.
We had previously agreed that:
Providing the offers on the other issues were positive, and the company agreed a distribution of the April 2004 pay review which addresses the Fair Pay issues, we would agree to take no further action in pursuit of the 2003 Fair Pay claim.
We are concerned that the company appear to be under the misapprehensions that:
1) a vague and woolly statement on pay is sufficient, and that
2) a redundancy agreement which reduced the entitlements of any of our members could be considered a "positive" offer.
The company must address these issues.
We are also concerned that the pace of progress is slowing, that the time committed by the company seems inadequate, that issues which Amicus raised months ago are only now being addressed, and that issues which had been resolved keep resurfacing. If the company is serious about a settlement, it can authorise managers to negotiate, and make them available.
We authorise our reps to continue talks, but to report back to us promptly if it appears that the company is not committed to quickly reaching a realistic settlement. Given the progress on the detail and wording of the offers, we believe a two-week period should be sufficient to achieve significant progress on all the key outstanding issues. We instruct our reps to report back to us after two weeks.
If at any point the Company breaks off negotiations, or refuses to further extend the 8-week period, we authorise our reps to call action short of strike and up to four days further strike action.
There will be an Extraordinary General Meeting:
3pm-4:30pm, Tuesday 11th November
MAN05 restaurant
This meeting is for ALL Amicus members employed by Fujitsu Services at MAN05 (including home-workers with a MAN05 admin base).
The agenda will include a report back on the latest state of the dispute negotiations and members' views will be sought on the acceptability or otherwise of any new proposals from the company.
If your manager will need to arrange cover for you to attend, please inform them straight away. If you have any difficulty getting release for this meeting, please contact your rep promptly.
We will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting for members on Tuesday 11th November in the MAN05 Restaurant from 3:00 until 4:30pm. Reps will report back on the latest dispute negotiations and seek views from the membership on what approach to pursue in the remaining talks.
The following update is from Dave Francis.
Independent advice: Non-Disclosure agreements have been sorted out and contact has been made with Bryan Freake (AMICUS Pensions full time official) .
He is being advised what the status is with the DB fund and advice is being sought about whether it's legal, "good/bad" etc.
A UKPCF meeting was held this week and the company expanded its ideas on the six areas it wishes to consult on and gave some examples on how they would work.
An update on this will coming shortly.
.
The UKPCF have booked meetings across various sites starting from next week where it is intended to provide feedback and seek your thoughts and feelings about these proposals face to face.
Meetings have been scheduled at MAN05 with Alan Hayes and Dave Francis ( AREA8 & AREA12) held jointly and some separately
Please see Cafevik Future Events to book onto one of these
http://www.cafevik.fs.fujitsu.com/scripts/Events/UserEvents.asp
If you are at other sites you can attend meetings presented by other UKPCF reps
For those unable or not wishing to attend, a synopsis will be emailed out as soon as more information is received.
Since the Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) on 22nd October, the negotiating team has met several more times with the company. Most of the time has been spent on Redundancy Agreement issues. Progress in the various areas can be summarised as :-
Members will recall that the law allows employees taking industrial action only 8 weeks breach of contract protection, from the date of the first such action. In order to be able to concentrate on negotiating rather than organising further industrial action, we have encouraged the company to extend the protected period and they have confirmed that this now extends up to 1st December.
Don't forget to bookmark the dispute web page for updates: http://www.ourunion.org.uk/icl/FJSdispute