The next meeting of the UNITE-Amicus Greater Manchester IT Branch is:
6pm-7:30pm, Thursday 7th June
Upstairs, Hare & Hounds pub, Shudehill, Manchester city centre, M4 4AA
[near the spiral ramp to the Arndale car park and the Shudehill Metrolink station]
As well as having time to discuss normal union business and workplace reports, we will have a guest speaker from the Campaign Against Climate Change.
All branch members are welcome to attend.
The Campaign Against Climate Change are also organising a:
Carnival Against Climate Change
Assemble 1pm, Saturday 30th June
Peace Gardens, near St Peter’s Square, Manchester (by the town hall)
As well as a variety of speakers there will be a cycling contingent, samba band, African drum band, circus acts, stalls etc.
UNITE members working for electronics firm Sunvic in Scotland have been on all-out strike since 21st March against attempts by the employer to change their contract to allow them to enforce periodic lay-offs or short-time working.
We know how important support has been in our own dispute – can you help raise support for them?
Please send messages of support to:
Sunvic Controls, Joint Shop Stewards Committee
c/o Margaret Paterson
51 Emily Drive
Motherwell ML1 2SH
Please make any donations payable to Sunvic Strike Fund
Our Reps are discussing sending a donation from our own strike fund.
When MPs and others contact the company to enquire about our dispute, the standard company response includes:
We have over 20 different recognition arrangements with a number of unions and work in a highly productive and co-operative way with all of them, apart from the Manchester group. This includes other groups where Amicus is also the recognised union.
Our Fujitsu colleagues in the PCS union in Swansea (working on the DVLA account) recently put out an announcement including this about their pay review (due 1st April 2007):
Pay negotiations – Pay Collective Bargaining Group
So far, the PCS Negotiating Team has held two meetings with Company Representatives, on 2nd and 9th May. The Company was represented by Andrew Carter (local management), Jane Harrison (HR) and Larry Upton (Fujitsu’s new-ish “Employee Relations Manager”). At the end of the second meeting, the Company undertook to put their final offer in writing by Friday, 18th May so you will be amazed to hear that PCS has so far not received any such written offer.
Members in the collective bargaining group will, of course, not be too surprised by this as it makes the fifth year (out of five since Transition into Fujitsu!) that the Company has prevaricated and delayed, missed deadlines, changed their minds, etc., etc. Each year our collective frustration and anger has grown at this disgraceful treatment, and last year the PCS Negotiating Team was criticised by members (with some justification) for allowing the Company to get away with dragging the whole thing out endlessly. The fact that we have each year managed eventually to negotiate a deal better than that meted out to our colleagues who do not have the benefit of collective bargaining must not be allowed to disguise the facts that:
Ø Fujitsu Services continues to treat union negotiations in a thoroughly unprofessional manner, and will presumably continue to do so until forced to improve, and
Ø Our settlements in each of the previous four years have been below realistic cost-of-living increase rates, and so members are worse off in real terms at a time when Fujitsu Services has repeatedly posted very high profits in the UK.
We wish our PCS colleagues every success in securing a fair pay settlement soon.
It’s great news that Gary Ellison is no longer at risk of redundancy, having accepted a job in the helpdesks. This is a major achievement, especially given the unrealistic timescales adopted by the company (in breach of the SEA). Many thanks to everyone who helped.
However, concerns remain for Gary (and for the rest of us) about the company’s mis-handling of the situation and the resulting changes to Gary’s terms and conditions.
UNITE will be helping Gary to seek a resolution to the issues affecting him personally. For the rest of us, a successful resolution of the dispute is essential to ensure that redeployment and redundancy are properly handled in future.
Members overwhelmingly voted to endorse the proposed Learning Partnership Agreement for Central Park.
This, along with last week’s highly successful Learning At Work Day (jointly organised by our Union Learning Reps and the company), should mark a turning point in improving access to learning and training for Central Park staff.
We’ve made tremendous progress with just two Union Learning Reps (ULRs) – Pauline Bradburn and Dean Burn. To build on this we need more ULRs and to ensure they reflect all the areas of the site. If you’d be interested in becoming a ULR or would like to suggest someone else, why not contact Pauline or Dean?
Talks aimed at resolving our long-running dispute continue to make progress, but important issues remain to be resolved.
Don’t forget that we plan to hold a lunchtime “Dispute Committee” meeting:
12:30-13:15, Thursday 31st May
Conference Room 35 G CR2 (MAN35 ground floor)
All members are welcome to come along.
UNITE is holding a series of meetings where our negotiating team will report back from the dispute talks. These are open to you and your colleagues (whether they’ve joined yet or not). Who can you bring along?
Please come along to one of the sessions that suits your diary:
| Day | Time | Venue |
| Tuesday 5th June |
12:30 – 13:00 | 33 G CR2 |
| 13:30 – 14:00 | 33 G CR2 | |
| 14:30 – 15:00 | 33 G CR2 | |
| Thursday 7th June |
10:00 – 10:30 | 33 G CR2 |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | 33 G CR2 | |
| 12:00 – 12:30 | 33 G CR2 |
If your manager might need to arrange cover for you to attend, please ask them for release straight away. Any problems – contact your rep without delay.
To see an electronic copy of our latest paper one-per-desk leaflet on Cafevik, click here (a local version is here).
This leaflet was produced for our Manchester Central Park site.
UNITE-Amicus Union Learning Reps Pauline Bradburn and Dean Burn, with the help of reps and our full time officers, have negotiated with Fujitsu for a Learning Partnership Agreement to cover Central Park.
The agreement lays the foundations for us to improve access to learning, training and development for Central Park staff.
Copies of the proposal are on CafeVIK and OurUnion for you to consider.
If you have questions about the proposed agreement, why not pop along to the MAN35 restaurant between 11am and 2pm on Learning At Work Day (this Thursday) and talk to Pauline, Dean or Helen Osgood (UNITE-Amicus Lifelong Learning Organiser).
Members were asked to vote by the end of the week.
30th April saw union Health & Safety Reps carrying inspections of many areas of Central Park. The results of those inspections have been published on CafeVIK for everyone to see.
Don’t forget that we only have Health & Safety Reps (and the right for them to carry out inspections) because we have union recognition. Most Fujitsu sites don’t enjoy this advantage yet.
While in the past we’ve often been frustrated at the slow response to inspection reports, this time site facilities have acted very rapidly to fix many of the issues identified – including ones they had been raising through other channels for months. This is a very welcome improvement.
Of course, some of the issues can’t be resolved overnight. One of the most fundamental is the general lack of (legally required) workstation assessments for each employee. Outside Manchester the company insists that untrained staff should assess themselves. For a while Fujitsu even pushed this here – despite decisions of the safety committees at West Gorton and more recently at Central Park. In practice this approach meant that assessments were generally missing, and even when completed they did little to improve our health and safety. At Central Park the company has agreed that assessments should be carried out by trained assessors.
Fujitsu needs to recruit and train up more workstation assessors and roll out a programme of assessment to prevent back and upper limb problems among staff increasing further. If you are interested, please speak to your manager or Health & Safety rep.
Talks aimed at resolving the dispute continue to make progress, with the aim of producing an offer from the company which members can vote on. You might think things have gone quiet, but there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes. The position is currently still too fluid for us to be able to make a written report on each of the issues or to publish draft agreements. However, we intend to hold meetings to report back from the talks early in June.
During the strikes, our open “strike committee” meetings proved a useful tool for members to get involved in discussing and deciding on the tactics of the dispute between full members’ meetings. We plan to hold a lunchtime “Dispute Committee” meeting:
12:30-13:15, Thursday 31st May
Conference Room 35 G CR2 (MAN35 ground floor)
All members are welcome to come along.
Hardship Payments and Additional Strike Assistance were paid out from our strike fund long ago. We are now told that Dispute Benefit cheques from union head office have been posted out to our home addresses.
As you are probably aware, Fujitsu put one of our members, Gary Ellison, on 30-days warning of redundancy. This was a breach of our Security of Employment Agreement (SEA) both because the company failed to notify or consult the union, and because Gary should have had 90-days warning.
The union had warned that there was a high risk that 30-days would not be long enough for Fujitsu to get organised and redeploy Gary, despite there being many jobs available.
After representations from UNITE, the company has slightly extended Gary’s warning period twice, so thankfully he is still currently in employment.
The company did offer one job, but on condition that Gary accepted detrimental changes to his terms and conditions. It would be far cheaper for Fujitsu to redeploy him on his existing contract than to spend thousands making a loyal employee redundant.
The short deadlines the company has set (in breach of our SEA) have made it impossible for UNITE, Gary or the company to fully follow up the various opportunities identified by employees through the union, let alone the hundreds of other vacancies.
At present, the company still intends to dismiss Gary this week, without having offered a single “suitable alternative job”. UNITE continues to support every effort to redeploy him.
Learning At Work Day is this Thursday, 24th May. You can read the leaflet about it on CafeVIK.
You can join in any time between 11am-2pm in the MAN35 canteen, when you can learn about the opportunities and resources available inside and outside Fujitsu. Fruit, smoothies, quizzes etc will be available too.
Meanwhile the MAN34 canteen will be putting on a Healthy Eating menu and recipes submitted by staff in our competition.
As well as working with the company to organise Learning At Work Day, our Union Learning Reps, Pauline Bradburn and Dean Burn, have been working on a new Learning Partnership Agreement intended to improve access to learning for all Central Park staff. We expect the proposed agreement to go out for you to vote on shortly.
If you’re not a member and are interested in finding out more about UNITE-Amicus in Fujitsu, you can leave your details here:
www.ourunion.org.uk/interested
April saw new legislation coming into force giving improvements to maternity leave and pay and the introduction of the right for carers to request flexible working. Key points are:
- Statutory maternity and adoption pay is extended from 26 weeks to 39 weeks for babies who are due on or after 1 April or where a child is placed for adoption on the same date.
- All pregnant employees regardless of length of service are entitled to 52 weeks maternity leave, made up of 26 weeks ordinary maternity leave and 26 weeks additional maternity leave.
- Women or adopters can go into work for up to 10 mutually agreed “Keeping in Touch Days” during Maternity/Adoption Leave.
- The regulations clarify that an employer is entitled to make reasonable contact with an employee during maternity and adoption leave.
- The notice period is extended from 4 to 8 weeks for an employee to notify their employer of return to work earlier than previously agreed or notified under Maternity and Adoption Leave.
- The right to request flexible working is extended to carers of adults.
The UNITE Negotiators' Guide on Work-Life Balance has been up-dated to incorporate these changes and is available online. The DTI website also gives detail on the act.
Long hours, pressure to work at weekends and poor or unfair payments for overtime, shifts or standby are major concerns for employees.
UNITE reps are playing their part alongside PCS reps and UKCF reps in trying to ensure that company plans to “harmonise” contracts for all UK employees make things better rather than worse.
This will affect you regardless of whether you currently work Out Of Hours, or whether you currently get paid for it.
Quite a number of members and non-members have already filled in our survey on Out Of Hours. The survey is available via a link from our campaign web page:
http://www.ourunion.org.uk/ooh
Please take the time to complete the survey, and encourage your workmates to do the same, whether they are in the union or not.
A number of important points relating to job security were covered at the May meeting of Fujitsu’s “UK Consultative Forum” (UKCF).
The official report isn’t out yet, but will appear on the “UK Consultative Forum” CafeVIK community when it has been agreed by HR. Though the majority of UKCF reps are union members, the UKCF is a company body, not a union one, and HR subject reps’ communications to approval.
The company is ramping up its efforts to move work to offshore and nearshore locations, but couldn’t tell UKCF reps which UK jobs would be affected. IS is creating 400 jobs in Russia, and is building up a buffer of 10-15% temps in preparation.
The multilingual helpdesk in Footscray had been moved to Portugal. The company reported that all 22 staff had been successfully redeployed. If this had been unsuccessful, the company might have had to make some of them redundant.
...
UNITE members from across the country raised the issue of the Security of Employment Agreement (SEA) at the UKCF. The company stated that it would honour the SEA for those with it specifically written into their contract. This is a tiny minority of staff, regardless of when you started with the company. In other cases HR would presume the SEA didn’t apply to you and it would be up to you to make a case to be treated as an exception. UNITE believes this means HR putting the onus on thousands of staff who have contractual rights to the SEA to prove it individually or lose massively. When asked about the company suggestion in the Manchester dispute talks that a cut-off date agreed in Manchester would be rolled out nationally, HR said they didn’t wish to discuss that with the UKCF.
In Manchester, the company has now twice extended the date when it intends to make Gary Ellison redundant. Fujitsu is under considerable pressure to redeploy Gary, given that there are plenty of jobs available and the situation has been so badly managed. Dismissing him with less than 90-days warning could only inflame the dispute over the company’s breaches of the SEA.
It seems likely that the outcome of the Manchester dispute will affect how staff across the UK are treated in redundancy situations. This would be similar to what happened in 2003 when Manchester staff won the Minimum Redundancy Payment (MRP) scheme which seems to be operating across the country. However, getting the company to adopt a “practice” nationally is not as good as having your rights enshrined in your contract of employment or a collective agreement.
Reps suggested through the UKCF that ERICs (requests for resource from Core) should be visible to employees. At the moment, many are unfilled when the work is supposed to start, and then are turned into RARs (Recruitment Authorisation Requests) which are too often filled by external recruitment without current staff having a real chance of getting the jobs first.
All the seats on the UKCF will be up for election in October, and UNITE has been working with other unions with the aim of agreeing a slate of candidates that all trade unionists in the company can support. If you’d consider standing, please get in touch.
You can read some of the material from the last election on the ourunion web site.
On 1st May, the first day of “UNITE” and International Workers’ Day, union organisers launched our national organising campaign in Fujitsu. Leaflets were initially distributed at sites in Belfast, Warrington, Wakefield, Footscray, Stevenage, Crewe and Manchester.
The launch has been followed up with a variety of meetings and activities.
If you’re interested in helping the campaign, please contact your local reps or organiser.
From 1st May, following a vote by members, Amicus merged with the TGWU to form UNITE, which is now the biggest union in the UK, with around 2 million members.
What was “Amicus” is now the Amicus section of “UNITE – The Union”. It will obviously take time for all the web sites, leaflets and other materials to change over to the new name, so you can expect to see both UNITE and Amicus used for a while. The new logo is here.
You can read the official Amicus press release on the web – the merger attracted a large amount of media interest. As the press release says:
“Unite will shortly have an annual budget of £15 million for organising – an unprecedented amount in British and Irish trade union history - which will be spent taking on anti-union employers across the economy and organising the thousands of workers of all ages who are not yet members.”
To see an electronic copy of our latest paper one-per-desk leaflet on Cafevik, click here (a local version is here).
This leaflet was produced for our Manchester Central Park site.
As of Tuesday 1st May, the merger between Amicus and the Transport & General Workers Union (TWGU) took effect, forming the biggest union in the UK, which will be known as “Unite – the Union”.
What was Amicus is now the Amicus section of the new union.
You can read the official Amicus press release on the web – the merger attracted a large amount of media interest. As the press release says:
“Unite will shortly have an annual budget of £15 million for organising – an unprecedented amount in British and Irish trade union history - which will be spent taking on anti-union employers across the economy and organising the thousands of workers of all ages who are not yet members.”
It will obviously take time for all the web sites, leaflets and other materials to change over to the new name, so you can expect to see both UNITE and Amicus used for a while. The new logo is here.
Gary Ellison’s job is still at risk, and time is short. Breaking our Security of Employment Agreement (SEA), Fujitsu has only offered a 30-day warning period, which runs out next week.
Fujitsu’s shoddy treatment of Gary has even attracted coverage in The Register, one of the online news sites for the IT industry.
Amicus has been helping Gary with a formal grievance over his treatment, and this got underway on Monday.
Meanwhile the Amicus email and paper newsletters have been helping encourage many people to help find opportunities for Gary. Many thanks to everyone who has already been in touch.
The response already shows that there is no legitimate reason for Fujitsu to dismiss Gary, but the company’s indecent haste does make it a challenge to follow up the various leads and get the company to turn them into firm job offers. To date, the company still hasn’t offered any alternative work.
Our recent leaflet was mainly about securing Gary a job and the implications for the rest of us of Fujitsu’s breach of the SEA, so it only touched on the Equal Opportunities aspects of the case, which has led to a few questions. To clarify:
- Amicus believes that Fujitsu’s failure to make relevant opportunities available to Gary is a breach of the Equal Opportunities section of our recognition agreement, as well as flying in the face of good practice.
- Gary’s allegation of racism is not something he’s only made now in response to the threat of redundancy – he had raised a formal grievance about this a couple of years ago (before he was a union member).
On the first of May UNITE (the new union formed by the merger of amicus and the TGWU unions on May 1st) launched its national organising campaign in Fujitsu. This is the leaftlet that was distributed in Manchester - similar leaflets were distributed in Footscray, Stevenage, Wakefield, Warrington, Belfast and Crewe.