Fujitsu UK is victimising a union officer
Despite UNI's affiliate UNITE offering solutions, the company has pressed on towards dismissing Alan Jenney, the Deputy Chair of the union’s Fujitsu UK Combine Committee, and a rep in Crewe. The company is saying that Alan could be dismissed as redundant from 10th July.
Whether the original job cut was genuine or not, it is clear that the company is singling Alan out and choosing to treat him worse than hundreds of other staff affected by job losses in Fujitsu. In its attempts to prevent Alan keeping his job, the company has (amongst many other things):
· Gone straight to redundancy without any attempt at redeployment
· Broken Manchester’s Annex 1 agreement (“Managing Changing Patterns of Employment), carrying out selection without even starting consultation with UNITE
· Broken the Security of Employment Agreement (SEA) by rejecting a volunteer who is willing to swap with Alan
The company’s approach reinforces the view that Alan is being victimised because of the work he does on behalf of employees across the company in his union role.
UNITE defends any member facing the loss of their job. This case is even more important because it threatens the ability of members to elect reps and have them carry out their duties. It is a threat to union organisation, as well as to Alan as an individual.
UNITE members employed by Fujitsu Services Ltd and contractually based at CRE02 have voted in a ballot for industrial action and plan to start their action on Thursday 30th June with a one-day strike and ongoing action short of strike. This will allow them to raise the profile of the campaign by uniting with public sector workers (many of whom are Fujitsu’s customers) striking on the same day.
For full details of the ballot result and notice of action, see www.ourunion.org.uk/news.
Alan’s case, along with other serious breaches of agreements, led to a collective grievance being lodged in Manchester. As a result, the company will be meeting with UNITE and ACAS today. Everyone is hoping that this meeting can resolve the issues and allow the Crewe strike to be called off, but UNITE cannot bank on this. On Friday, UNITE members in Manchester decided that they want the union to ballot them for industrial action too, if significant progress is not rapidly made.
The breaches of agreements include matters affecting pensions for employees whether or not they were previously in the ICL DB pension plan, and which were in last year’s national “ACAS agreement”.
The breaches of agreements and the attempt to pick off reps affect Fujistsu employees as a whole because they threaten the union’s ability to support any member on any issue.
For updates on the campaign, see www.ourunion.org.uk/news. You can also follow #DefendAlanJ on Twitter (http://twitter.com/DefendAlanJ) or friend “Unite At Fujitsu” on Facebook (http://facebook.com/uniteatfujitsu)
Fair and Transparent Pay and Benefits
Fujitsu’s survey of employees backs up UNITE’s decision to make fair and transparent pay and benefits our main campaign in the IT Services industry. Only 9% of people believe that the better their performance, the better their pay will be. It would have been interesting if the company had also asked whether people thought the better the company’s performance, the better their pay would be.
Fujitsu (predictably) refused to provide information in response to UNITE’s questions about the pay system, which were also sent to other major IT Services companies. What have they got to hide?
UNITE will soon launch the next step in the campaign, which will be a survey of employees designed to gather the sort of information which Fujitsu is declining to provide. It will be very important for members to encourage colleagues to complete this – the union will need a good response to make the results statistically valid.
For more information about the campaign, see:
www.unitetheunion.org/itcharter
The union previously welcomed the inclusion in the company standard pay guidelines of a gradual move towards “external” pay comparators, rather than just using the median salaries of Fujitsu’s own staff (which tend to fluctuate and are not linked to market rates). Sadly, the company didn’t actually implement this – no externally-based comparators have been provided to pay planning managers and the company has not answered any of UNITE’s questions about how they propose to generate them.