The Joint Working Group meets monthly to share information, discuss issues that affect employees in the north-west who are represented by UNITE, and to manage the engagement between UNITE and Fujitsu over the full range of issues.
The most recent meeting took place on 24th September, and the agenda included major items on redundancy and redeployment and pension auto-enrolment.
Minutes of the meeting will be published when agreed. Previous minutes, including those from the meeting on 3rd September, can be found here on CafeVIK.
Our next meeting will be on Monday 29th October and the agenda includes a discussion on how to resolve issues promptly and without conflict, and forecast job and skills requirements (including new jobs and jobs at risk).
If you have views on the subjects under discussion, we would welcome your input.
Joint Working Group Members
| Company Rep | Description | UNITE Rep | Description |
| Stuart Broadbelt (chair / vice-chair) | Director, Supply & Lifecycle Services | Lynne Hodge (chair / vice-chair) | MAN33, TSS, Hosting & Network Services |
| Jenny O’Reilly (joint secretary) | HR Consultant | Ian Allinson (joint secretary) | MAN34, CSA, Hosting & Network Services |
| Ellie Peter | HR Business Partner | Isabel Hay | WAR08, DEV, Hosting & Network Services |
| Keith Clifton | Head of HNO UK Shared Services | Maurice Edwards | MAN23, OPS, Hosting & Network Services |
| Jane Jacques | VME Centre of Excellence Manager | Pauline Bradburn | MAN34, TSS, End User Services |
| Jason Fowler | HR Service Delivery Director | Phil Tepper | MAN34, PJM, Hosting & Network Services |
| Richard Batty | Head of Service Desks | Note: Unite reps on the JWG also have deputies |
2013 Diaries
Our Fujitsu North-West branch has agreed to buy a number of 2013 UNITE diaries which will be allocated free to branch members on a first-come-first-served basis.
Using a UNITE diary helps raise the profile of the union, and the diaries normally contain useful information about the union and its services.
If you would like a diary, please email contact us. If you aren’t based on a Fujitsu site, please give the address to which you’d like the diary sent.
Branch Meetings
UNITE’s Fujitsu North-West branch meetings for the rest of 2012 are 5:30-7pm on:
The branch meetings take place in conference room 34GCR2 in the MAN34 building at Fujitsu, Central Park, Northampton Road, Manchester, M40 5BP.
All branch members are welcome.
Stop Ambulance Privatisation
Many of you will have seen the proposals to sell off Greater Manchester’s NHS Ambulance Patient Transport Service to the bus company Arriva.
If you haven’t already done so, please support the campaign to keep ambulance services public by signing the petition here. The web site also includes lots more information.
Please see a local copy of our national "one per desk" newsletter here. A version internal to Fujitsu is available here.
UNITE has recently been briefed on a new redundancy exercise the company intends to implement, this time within the Finance function. A headcount reduction of around 30 out of 100 nationally is planned.
Once again UNITE reps want to be able to advise and support all of our members who are currently working in Finance and who now find themselves at risk of redundancy. To do this we need to ensure we have a full list of members ‘in scope’.
If you’re one of those in scope please use the voting button to let us know, or if you can’t see the voting button reply to this email with “In Scope: Finance”.
If you have colleagues in scope who are not union members, please encourage them to join. Remember that Unite are currently offering £25 in vouchers to any member who recruits a new member who joins online – see here for details.
Some people in the company’s management sometimes reflect and exacerbate poor industrial relations by trying to “shoot the messenger” by treating reps unfairly. UNITE members in Manchester have a good record in defending their reps, most notably seeing off attempts to discipline Ian Allinson (for failing to follow an instruction he had never been given) during the dispute in 2006-7 and to discipline Phil Tepper (for carrying out a survey on workplace stress) in 2011.
There have also been other lower-profile cases of reps being treated unfairly, and two of these seem to be coming to a head.
Jay Lieberman
Jay became a UNITE rep during our national strike over Jobs, Pay and Pensions in 2009-10 and is now one of the five Manchester members of UNITE’s Fujitsu UK Combine Committee. Jay has faced rumbling issues since he received inappropriate negative feedback from a manager which related to his role in the strike. Rather than resolving these issues, many of the company’s actions have made them worse, and Jay has had an extended period off with stress and difficulty securing assignments.
During the period, the company has gone through phases of repeatedly asking Jay to leave the company with a Compromise Agreement (CA), even when he has made it clear that he wants to stay working in Fujitsu. This is part of a pattern where it appears the company is trying to “manage him out of the business”.
UNITE reps have come across quite a few cases where the company decides to “manage people out”, often based on no more than a manager taking a dislike to someone. A worrying feature of several of these cases is that where people turn down CAs, the company then threatens or initiates disciplinary action against them on spurious conduct or capability grounds.
Legitimate disciplinary action is normally taken promptly, relates to specific charges, follows unsuccessful informal attempts to deal with issues, and is initiated following an investigation which seeks evidence both for and against the individual. In cases where the company is trying to “manage someone out” UNITE is seeing disciplinary action launched out of the blue, often based on events many months ago, and on vague charges.
Employees invited to a disciplinary hearing have a right to know the charges and evidence against them, with enough detail and time in advance of the hearing to prepare their defence.
In Jay’s case, the company has initiated the disciplinary procedure without conducting an investigation first. The charges are so vague that it would be impossible to refute them, and evidence has been late, missing or irrelevant.
The central allegation against Jay is that he “knowingly made false, malicious or spurious claims” but the company has so far been unwilling to tell Jay what these alleged claims were. This is reminiscent of the attempted action against Ian Allinson in 2006 when the company claimed Ian had failed to follow a reasonable instruction but didn’t for some time say what the instruction was or when Ian was supposed to have received it.
UNITE continues to demand that Jay receives fair treatment from the company. If Fujitsu presses ahead with the action, your support may be needed once again.
Ian Allinson
UNITE and the company have an agreement that reps should “neither benefit nor suffer detriment” as a result of their role. It is members who should assess the performance of reps at election time, and it is important that members can choose their representatives freely – without members being discouraged from standing for fear of detriment – and without any suspicion that candidates are standing for their individual advancement rather than for the collective advancement of all members.
Ian was carrying out various representative roles (mainly UNITE, but also UKCF and Fujitsu Voice) full-time for most of the period from 2002 to 2012. During that time the company consistently awarded Ian below-average pay rises and failed to fully apply the pay and benefits agreements to him. While other employees have benefitted from the agreements that Ian has helped negotiate, the company is denying Ian the same benefits because of his representative role.
With UNITE’s support, Ian is trying to resolve these issues through the company grievance procedure, which will shortly go to the final stage. In addition, UNITE has submitted a tribunal application on Ian’s behalf in order to ensure that he doesn’t fall foul of legal time limits.
To: Employees in scope of the Manchester Recognition Agreement
In responding to the UNITE survey following the closure of MAN35, staff identified two widespread issues with their working environment:
UNITE Health & Safety Reps followed this up by inviting residents of MAN33 and MAN34 to place a green or a red dot on to a floor diagram at their desk position to indicate whether or not they experienced each issue, and to comment further on any concerns. Thank you to everyone who took part.
Copies of the floor diagrams and the resulting analysis can be found here:
UNITE has written to the company asking them to engage with us to review the results and to seek ways to improve the situation. As a first step, we have suggested a meeting (including a demonstration of the capabilities of the Building Management System), followed by a walkabout of the two identified areas to talk to staff and try to identify remedies.
We will keep you informed of progress.
If you would like to get more involved in progressing these issues within your own area, or if any of the issues that you reported via the survey are resolved, please let your local UNITE Rep know, or email contact us.
UNITE Health & Safety Reps
Well done to all the members and non-members who took part in the protest on 3rd September, attended the members’ meeting on 5th September or supported the campaign in other ways.
UNITE is pleased to report that the company did not go ahead with dismissing Pete ---. The company postponed the dismissal several times and has now offered Pete a job which he has accepted and begun.
Fujitsu and every UNITE member can be proud of maintaining our record of nobody in the bargaining unit being forced out through redundancy without their consent. There is no doubt that this would not have been achieved without our hard-won agreements, the support of employees and considerable effort by a number of people in the company’s management.
However, the picture is not entirely one of unblemished good news.
Fujitsu did not offer Pete any of the “suitable alternative jobs” that were available. The company accepts that the job it has offered Pete is an “alternative job” rather than a “suitable alternative job”. This is primarily because it is in Blackpool, which is a big change for someone who lives in South Manchester and has a young family.
UNITE reps are currently awaiting confirmation from Pete that suitable flexible arrangements have been made to ensure that he can make a go of his new job. If this is not successful, Pete would need another redeployment or to claim redundancy during his 6-month “trial period” in the new job.
The rocky road that has brought us to this point has some important lessons for other redeployment and redundancy situations such as in Service Desk Solutions and the MAN23 closure.
Support
The level of proactive support given to employees at risk varies enormously. In some cases managers and HR actively look for suitable alternative work for staff at risk, ring fence jobs to give staff at risk priority in applying for them, put in place training and shadowing in other roles etc. This approach should be the norm, not the exception.
In Pete’s case, he had to push (with UNITE support) for everything. Members at risk should learn from this case – not to take things at face value or rely on everything going smoothly.
The company decided, late in the process and without justification, that it wouldn’t allow Pete to work his notice, which would have allowed him more time to seek redeployment, and his sudden dismissal was only averted by UNITE putting in a collective grievance. Members should try to get a decision on working notice as early as possible in the process.
Pete had to challenge jobs he had applied for being offered to staff not at risk – before he’d even been interviewed. The company turned down opportunities to “pair” other employees willing to give Pete their jobs and take Voluntary Redundancy on the feeblest of grounds.
If you are at risk, ask for what you want as early as possible and keep pushing for it.
Treating Employees with Respect
The company caused Pete unnecessary stress at a number of key points. After having committed to respect the “status quo” and deal with the grievance about the redundancies, it reversed its position without explanation and decided to dismiss Pete. The company then repeatedly postponed Pete’s dismissal date by short periods. This meant Pete was repeatedly put in the position of not knowing whether he would have a job the next day. On one occasion the company failed to stop aspects of his dismissal being processed and he lost access to company systems.
Once the company decided to offer Pete the Blackpool job, it had to prepare a written job offer setting out the details.
UNITE reps are used to this kind of brinksmanship from the company in collective discussions, where this behaviour is bad enough. It would be better to try to resolve issues through constructive dialogue than engaging in such “hard-sell” tactics. But UNITE has made clear to Fujitsu that it is completely unacceptable to treat an individual employee in this way. employees should be encouraged to take major life decisions after calm reflection on all the facts, and the opportunity to discuss the options with their families.
Avoiding Redundancies
A central part of UNITE’s collective grievance over the redundancies was the company’s failure to carry out the measures to avoid redundancies set out in section 6.1 of the Annex 1 agreement, which cover issues such as looking at reducing overtime or use of contractors in preference to cutting jobs.
Despite UNITE writing to Duncan Tait twice, raising the issues through the redundancy consultation forums, raising them through the Joint Working Group and a collective grievance, some people in HR still claim to have been unaware that UNITE had any issues.
Last week UNITE had a constructive discussion with the company about how issues are handled, with an emphasis on more dialogue at an earlier stage. This discussion will continue at the Joint Working Group meeting on 29th October.
In August the company notified employees in the Service Desk Solutions (SDS) unit within End User Systems of proposed headcount reductions. The company did not envisage any redundancies but asked SDS employees to seek redeployment to yield the required reductions (approximately 30 out of 100).
UNITE reps want to be able to advise and support all of our members who are currently working in SDS and who have been put in this position. To do this we need to ensure we have a full list of members ‘in scope’.
If you’re one of those in scope please use the voting button to let us know, or if you can’t see the voting button reply to this email with “In Scope: SDS”.
We understand the company is now offering some people Compromise Agreements as a means of reducing SDS headcount. Members in SDS or anywhere else should contact a rep without delay if they find themselves in this situation.
If you have colleagues in scope who are not union members, please encourage them to join. Remember that Unite are currently offering £25 in vouchers to any member who recruits a new member who joins online – see here for details.