There are major changes coming to the UNITE Greater Manchester IT Branch.
The time and venue of our meetings is changing to encourage more branch members to attend. They will now be held:
5:30-7pm at
Fujitsu Services, Central Park, Northampton Road, Manchester, M40 5BP.
There’s a map here.
Non-Fujitsu employees should report to the reception at MAN34 (the middle building), from where you can be escorted on site.
The dates for meetings for the remainder of the year are:
· Thursday 4th September
· Thursday 2nd October
· Thursday 6th November
· Thursday 4th December
All these meetings will take place in conference room 34GCR2.
The September meeting will elect new branch officers for 2009-2010. Derek Wise and Bill Whitehurst, who have served our members as branch secretary and treasurer for many years, have indicated that they do not intend to seek re-election, so new volunteers are particularly welcome. The new officers will take office in the New Year, so there will be a period of handover.
Many thanks to Derek and Bill for their valuable contribution.
All branch members are encouraged to come along and take part in the discussions and decisions.
If you know a few Fujitsu friends or colleagues who aren’t in the union yet but you think might be interested, why not pass this email on to them?
If you’re one of those friends or colleagues, and are interested in finding out more about UNITE in Fujitsu, you can leave your details here:
www.ourunion.org.uk/interested
…or just join of course!
Anger about job security on top of real-terms pay cuts and loss of bonus is leading more and more Fujitsu staff to join UNITE, especially in the light of our recent successes on a wide range of issues.
A large membership is essential to have an effective union, but it is not sufficient. Organising is about employees having the confidence and organisation to solve workplace problems for themselves.
The “national protocol” agreed last year is helping members across the company to carry out union activity in the workplace without the sort of threats and intimidation which have sometimes occurred in the past.
Reps from across the country have discussed the protocol and identified what improvements are most important when it is next reviewed with the company.
WAR08 and Glasgow are some of the furthest advanced sites – UNITE has formally asked the company for union recognition at both. Sarah Holden, our UNITE senior organiser, had a second meeting with the company recently to discuss the recognition claim, and a timescale has been agreed for the company to respond to our proposals.
The UNITE Greater Manchester IT branch has decided to pay for all its members to have free access to the “online publications database” of the Labour Research Department (LRD).
The LRD (not connected with the Labour Party) provides authoritative information about employment related matters, written with union reps and members in mind. The database contains electronic versions of all their booklets and magazines, which can be browsed or searched.
If you are a member of the branch and want to access the database, go to:
Select “Publications Online” from the “Services” menu and log on using the username and password provided in the original email.
If you are a member of a different branch you may wish to propose that your branch does the same.
Fujitsu Services made a profit of £93m last year, despite taking a “worst case” view of the losses from the NHS (including costs being incurred now) and taking them all last year. This profit was down to the hard work of employees, for which few feel adequately rewarded.
The company announcement about its sponsorship of an exhibition at the Tate Modern gallery has provoked another wave of rage about pay and bonuses.
UNITE carried out an email poll to see whether people want to push for an extra pay increase. This has since been followed up with a paper version, included in our third national leaflet of 2008.
You can read the Manchester version of the leaflet online. If a version hasn’t yet been distributed at your site, why not get in touch?
UNITE reps from across Fujitsu recently met and reviewed the results of the poll. There are already an impressive number of members and non-members from across the UK who have volunteered to help with a pay campaign. Initially, UNITE is asking them to help distribute leaflets, to chase their colleagues to respond to the poll, and to join the union if they haven’t already done so.
The reps felt that it would be difficult to bring a pay campaign to a climax in the middle of the current major redundancy exercise, so the intention is to build the campaign up gradually. If you have suggestions for the campaign, please speak to your local rep.
UNITE’s joint work with Fujitsu on the pilot Equal Pay Review continues, albeit slowly. Meanwhile UNITE is encouraging female employees to take part in a survey of how people feel about equal pay being conducted by the Intellect “Women in IT Forum”. For more information about it, see www.intellectuk.org/women.
The company’s UK Consultative Forum (UKCF) met on 30th July. The UKCF is not a union body, but most of the UKCF reps elected by employees are union members. Forums such as the UKCF are no substitute for union organisation, but they do have a part to play and UNITE is committed to making the UKCF as effective as possible.
Some of the key points from the meeting which aren’t covered elsewhere in this newsletter were:
There will soon be by-elections for four vacant UKCF seats, which are in the following regions:
· North West (includes Crewe, Manchester and Warrington)
· Midlands (includes Telford and Solihull)
· Thames Valley and South West (includes Bracknell, Bristol, Slough, Staines etc)
· London, South and East (includes Footscray and Stevenage)
In previous elections, most employees have chosen to be represented by union members on the forum, and UNITE intends to work with other unions in Fujitsu to identify good candidates that all union members can support.
If you would be interested in standing for election, please get in touch as soon as possible. Given that there is currently only one female UKCF rep, women members are particularly encouraged to consider standing.
You can see the information that UNITE put together for previous elections at www.ourunion.org.uk/ukcf.htm.
Steady progress is being made to redeploy staff at risk of redundancy following the termination of Fujitsu’s NHS contract. When the contract was terminated the number of employees in scope was 804, when the company formally put employees “at risk” on 20th June this was down to 672, and by Friday it was down to 498.
Fujitsu has decided to take out of scope for redundancy four further groups:
* Staff working on PACS/RIS, for which Fujitsu expects to get a new contract
* Staff working on the support of the eight “live” sites. We expect these jobs to TUPE transfer to BT
* Some IS staff who are no longer aligned to NHS work
* Agents working on the National Service Desk (though there is a possibility they could be subject to a separate 90-day redundancy consultation if the contract is terminated)
UNITE and Fujitsu are both pressing for Connecting for Health (CfH) to make a speedy decision about future suppliers for the remainder of the work, so that more staff can TUPE transfer across rather than being made redundant. UNITE has already met with the heads of CfH and is now seeking a meeting with ministers to press the case. There are signs of progress on enlarging the group which would transfer, though the situation remains very uncertain.
While UNITE is doing all it can to promote redeployment and transfer to other suppliers, we have to prepare for the possibility that redundancies might not be completely avoided. There are a number of steps that Fujitsu could and should be taking at the appropriate time:
* Communicating openly with staff across the company about what is going on
* Seeking volunteers for redundancy elsewhere in the company and accepting them where NHS staff can be redeployed into their jobs
* Extending the consultation period beyond 18th September to allow more time for alternative suppliers to be identified and for staff to be redeployed
* Doing more to replace contractor and temp positions with permanent jobs
* Authorising recruitment into teams that are understaffed
* Stopping paid and unpaid overtime throughout the company, unless it can be demonstrated that staff at risk couldn’t be redeployed to do the work
* Allowing those staff at risk who request it to leave early unless there is a specific reason this can’t be allowed
If you are aware of anything in your area that could be changed to help the situation, please contact your UNITE rep as soon as possible. Examples might be identifying unfilled vacancies, understaffing or excessive workload.
The current situation is clearly demonstrating the benefits of union recognition, and in particular the “Annex 1” agreement secured by Manchester members last year. In many areas it is being recognised as best practice by employees and managers alike – the NHS Consultation Forum is pressing for many aspects of it to be applied everywhere.
One of the challenges is to ensure that the support given to members isn’t diluted by large numbers of people joining at the last minute and demanding individual attention. At a recent national meeting of UNITE reps in Fujitsu, it was agreed that while everyone will benefit from the work UNITE is doing at a collective level, reps will only give individual support (in relation to these redundancies) to members who join by “day 59” of the consultation, which is 18th August 2008. If you have colleagues affected by these redundancies, please encourage them to join as quickly as possible, so that they can get maximum benefit from their membership.