The next meeting of the Amicus Greater Manchester IT Branch is:
6pm-7:30pm, Thursday 1st September
Upstairs, Hare & Hounds pub, Shudehill, Manchester City Centre, M4 4AA.
[This is near Shudehill Metrolink station and the spiral ramp to the Arndale Car Park]
All branch members are encouraged to attend.
In the near future all branch members should be receiving an individual email or letter from the branch. This will include a check of the details the union holds about you. It is important that you check this carefully and correct any mistakes.
Many of you will know that Chris Morton, who has been an Amicus Rep and Health & Safety Rep for a number of years, is leaving the company to pursue a new career in teaching. Thanks to Chris for all his hard work over the years, particularly for the huge number of individual cases he dealt with. We wish him luck for the future.
Amicus is tackling a wide range of issues at the moment, and the need for effective union organisation has never been more obvious. If you’d be interested in becoming a rep (or would like to suggest someone else), please get in touch.
A major campaign is building to defend the Amicus organisation at Rolls Royce. The company has sacked Jerry Hicks, a senior union representative. A tribunal has already asked for his reinstatement, but the company has so-far refused. They did, however, offer Jerry £50,000 to stop the campaign, but members understand that the issue is bigger than Jerry, and union organisation is not for sale.
Amicus members at Bristol are now on all-out strike for Jerry’s reinstatement, and the action is expected to spread if necessary.
For more information, see http://www.union.coreoperations.co.uk/rolls
Many members will remember what a difference it made for us in 2003 to receive the messages of support and donations from across the trade union movement when we were defending our organisation. We were able to send off an initial £130 donated by members on the day of our General Meeting, and the branch has since sent £200 more.
Financial support for the members at Rolls Royce will be vital – both to pay their bills and to ensure the company knows they can afford to stay out until they win. If you would like to contribute to a collection or regular levy in support of the Rolls Royce workers, please reply using the voting button.
Some of the strikers are touring workplaces in Manchester next week to raise support, so if you’d like to meet them to find out more about the dispute, please let us know ASAP by using the voting button.
Amicus has called a national demonstration in Bristol for Friday 2nd September. If you are able to go, please let us know.
The opening of the new Central Park site was bound to throw up all sorts of issues – just as you’d have a “snag list” with a new house. It’s important that employees raise all these niggles – otherwise they’ll never get sorted out.
Four of the Amicus Health & Safety reps (Alan Child, Andy C Smith, Ian Allinson and Phil Tepper) are among those who’ve already moved in to Central Park, and they’ve been helping employees raise some of the issues that are H&S related.
Some employees in MAN34 were suffering from glare when sitting at their desks from certain very bright lights in the restaurant. These lights have now been switched off, and we hope a more permanent solution can be found.
The union has had some success in getting a few of the most urgent problems resolved. For example, the main fire exit route from the MAN34 restaurant was not marked, and the most visible door that looked like a fire exit actually led into the construction site – where people would have been trapped next to the building. Another example is that after we pointed out the inadequate Fire Marshall coverage, the company has at long last asked for more volunteers.
It’s worth noting that many problems might never have been identified – until it was too late – if we didn’t have union recognition at Central Park. Many key Health & Safety documents are held by subcontractors rather than Fujitsu directly, and they have policies to prevent employees taking copies of the documents to examine them properly. Health & Safety Reps have repeatedly had to use their legal powers to insist on taking copies of key documents. Most Fujitsu sites have no Health & Safety reps, because they don’t yet have union recognition.
On 30th June Amicus had written to the company, copying David Courtley, highlighting systematic failures in their management of Health & Safety. The letter had ended:
...
We believe that the problems are easy to solve. In most cases Amicus has offered the solutions many times over a period of years. The responsibility now lies with the management of the company to bring itself up to at least the legal minimum standard.
In our previous efforts to raise standards we have observed that despite our efforts to work cooperatively, change only seems to occur when we set the company clear targets and deadlines. If the company is serious about meeting the legal requirements, we believe it can do so by 1st September 2005. If this doesn’t happen, or if in the meantime we see little progress towards that deadline, we will have no choice but to contact the enforcing authorities.
Sadly we have seen no serious effort to address the issues raised in our letter. Indeed, recent attempts to report major hazards at Central Park have highlighted many of the problems we raised. Until the company addresses its underlying failure to manage Health & Safety properly it seems inevitable that they will continue to expose employees to avoidable risks.
The company urgently needs more volunteers to act as Fire Marshals and First Aiders.
We also encourage members to consider becoming Health & Safety reps. Ideally we should have a Health & Safety rep from every area or team. H&S reps are entitled to proper training and to time-off to carry out their duties. They carry no legal responsibility for H&S, but do have extensive powers. If you are interested in becoming a H&S rep, please let us know.
Though employees in the Manchester bargaining unit have fared better than those elsewhere, the company is not doing a good job of keeping the promises it made to employees in the pay deal.
It is difficult for Amicus, let alone individual employees, to know whether they are being short-changed because of the veil of secrecy that the company throws around pay and benefits.
However, Amicus reps have still been able to identify dozens of examples where the company has broken its promises. We have highlighted many of these to the company and have asked for the employees concerned to be paid the extra they are entitled to – backdated to 1st April.
Your reps are heavily dependent on members to speak up if they think they’ve been short-changed – please check the agreement and talk to your reps immediately if you think you may have an issue.
One element that we have had great difficulty checking is the company commitment to ensure nobody is paid less than 75% of the median UK Fujitsu Services salary for their role. The company refused to disclose this information unless your reps agreed to keep it secret from you. Members decided at a General Meeting that reps should not accept the information on this basis, and should seek to force disclosure. This resulted in Amicus lodging an application to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), using rights that arise from having union recognition.
Yesterday the CAC held an informal meeting with Fujitsu management and Amicus. This did not resolve the issue, but the company and Amicus have agreed to meet at MAN05 on 16th September. At this meeting ACAS will be acting as “conciliators”, which means they will assist the parties in trying to reach an agreement. If conciliation is unsuccessful, the case will go forward to a formal CAC hearing. A hearing involves a CAC panel of three who listen to the arguments of both parties and then make a binding ruling. The panel is made up of the chair (who also chaired yesterday’s meeting), a member with experience as an employee representative, and a member with experience as an employer representative.
You will already have seen that Amicus has published the first results from our 2005 survey of Fujitsu Services pay. There will be much more to come.
In May, Amicus held its first Policy and Rules Conference since its formation. The conference brought together delegates from the former MSF, AEEU, UNIFI and GPMU trade unions – all together now in Amicus.
This was the first opportunity for members to set policy for the new union, and debates ranged far and wide, including Offshoring, Employment Rights, Redundancy, Agency & Temporary workers, Working Hours, Harassment and Bullying at work, Union Organising, Training, Pensions, Equalities, Public Services, Privatisation, Health & Safety, Manufacturing, the Minimum Wage, Europe and the Euro, Iraq and International trade and justice.
Conference also agreed a number of significant changes to the union’s rules, including the setting up of new structures to improve grass-roots organisation in each geographical area, stronger Equality structures, and that all new union Full Time Officers are to be elected by the members.
You can now read all the conference decisions for yourself here.
CSC, one of Fujitsu’s major competitors in the IT outsourcing business, has signed an agreement with Amicus on how offshoring will be handled. You can read the Amicus report (including the text of the agreement) on the union’s national web site here.
The deal has attracted support from the UK government and a lot of favourable media coverage.
Fujitsu has an “Offshore” Community on CafeVIK, and it is clear that Fujitsu employees can’t just hope the issue will go away. The company’s case study on the offshoring of 7799 certainly provides a few surprises.
There are a range of Amicus materials about offshoring available for download on the “Amicus The Union” CafeVIK Community, in the section headed “Offshoring” towards the bottom of the page.
The Amicus 2005 survey of Fujitsu Services Pay is now closed, and the union has begun analysing the results. Many thanks to the 613 members and non-members across the company who completed the survey.
The first batch of results includes:
The pay survey home page is here:
http://www.ourunion.org.uk/paysurvey2005
This is the link to give to your colleagues; more results will be published as the analysis continues.
In case the company goes even further in its attempts to prevent employees hearing any news or views not approved by the censor-in-chief, we recommend that employees take the following steps now:
A) Add the key external union web sites to your Favourites or Bookmarks:
· http://www.ourunion.org.uk (lots of Fujitsu specific news and information)
· http://www.amicustheunion.org (main Amicus national web site)
B) Set up your CafeVIK so that you can see news from key communities:
Communities used to be able to put "headlines" on the CafeVIK home page, to draw major news items to the attention of employees. The facility was removed from the Amicus community some time ago, after we committed the heinous crime of publishing a guide on how to set up CafeVIK. The facility has since been removed from most other communities, so most employees only get a diet of bland and irrelevant headlines.
However, the facility still exists for you to get articles onto your home page under the "My News" heading - if you set it up. It only takes a couple of minutes - here's how:
i) Click on http://www.cafevik.fs.fujitsu.com/scripts/ASPXLoad.asp?ASPX=news/acommunities
ii) Select the communities you want news from. To stay informed, you may want some/all of:
· Amicus The Union
· Business Update For Managers
· Employee Consultation
· Fujitsu Services Consultative Forum
· Home Based Working
· HRDirect
· Occupational Health and Safety
· Opportunities and Resourcing
· UK Consultative Forum
Plus things like:
· The community for your site (if there is one)
· The community for your Professional Community
· The community for your capability or business unit or main customer
· Manchester Move
You probably don't want any of the red ones (corporate communities), as most of their news items appear as headlines anyway.
iii) Click "Update"
C) Make sure you read union email and paper notices
You may remember that Amicus produced leaflets as part of our national pay campaign headed "Tackling Secrecy" to highlight the way the company keeps pay scales secret from the employees they affect.
In a move worthy of a Whitehall farce, managers on a couple of sites responded to the leaflet by telling Amicus members that they mustn't distribute leaflets, as well as trying to arrange for the leaflets to be collected and destroyed. Peter Skyte, the Amicus National Secretary for our industry, has now written to Roger Leek, the head of HR, pointing out that it is an offence under section 146 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 to prevent or deter an employee from taking part in the activities of an independent trade union at an appropriate time or to penalise them for doing so.
Following the routine May meeting of the full UKCF, the Employee Reps drafted minutes of the meeting, and sent them to the company Reps for comment and agreement - as normal. However, the Company has objected to the publication of both the minutes and the UKCF sub-group reports that were submitted to and discussed at the meeting.
The UKCF is there as a channel for the company to inform and consult employees. This cannot happen if you are unaware of what the company is doing or what your representatives are saying on your behalf. The minutes and reports are central to the effective operation of the UKCF.
Following iterations in which the Employee Reps tried to edit the documents to the Company's satisfaction whilst still maintaining a faithful report of what was said and discussed, the Reps concluded that the process could not go on forever. The reps prefixed the documents to emphasise that these were reports from employee reps alone, and not agreed with Fujitsu management, and published them on the UKCF's CafeVIK Community.
The Company immediately closed down the entire UKCF CafeVIK Community, leaving the UKCF Reps with no means to communicate with the employees they represent. Unlike a trade union, the UKCF has no organisation beyond the company, so finds it harder to bypass such censorship.
Nearly a week later, the UKCF Community finally re-appeared on CafeVIK. However, all the recent reports have been removed. More importantly, the Authority for the UKCF community is now Philippa Holroyd from Group HR and the employee reps have no publishing rights.
The next meeting of the UKCF will be on 11-12 August. The only item on the agenda is to find a way forward and get the UKCF working.
Many employees will be unaware of all this - please talk to your colleagues. The situation highlights the need for an independent trade union in Fujitsu. Why not ask a colleague to join (see CafeVIK or the Internet)?
Senior management seem to be stepping up their efforts to deny employees any source of independent information. They are trying to place new restrictions on how Amicus and employee reps on the company's own UK Consultative Forum (UKCF) can communicate with staff.
It is particularly ironic that senior management should be trying to gag employee representatives at a time when they are launching a "branding" campaign with "straight talking" and "genuine listening" as key themes.