Fancy a Cruise Down the Channel?

A professional and honest approach to human relations can bring benefits to an employer, and a good HR  manager can certainly make it easier for a trade union to reach a negotiated outcome. But in our experience some  employers have scant regard for HR, and others simply appoint HR  mangers whose sole remit seems to be to say “No”. Then there are those from the anti-union stable who seek to divide and rule, and those who remain remote in their ivory towers. Not surprising then that this poor approach to HR is more aptly known as Human Remains.

Sadly, HR big cheeses have not helped improve their image this week. According to Personnel Today,  a group of them are holding a conference on a luxury cruise liner somewhere in the English Channel. This gives a whole new slant to the phrase “out of touch”.

Scandal Of Mistreatment and Low Pay

Two million UK workers are ‘trapped in a continual round of low-paid and insecure work where mistreatment is the norm’ according to the findings of the TUC’s Commission on Vulnerable Employment, published this week.

The Commission, set up by the TUC and involving employers and independent experts as well as trade unionists, says Government, unions, employers and consumers must now all play a part in ending exploitation at work.

Commissioners say that they were shocked both by the extent of vulnerable work and that much of the poor treatment they found was perfectly legal. The report says that ‘employment practices attacked as exploitative in the 19th century are still common today’ and that the ‘poor treatment at work that we have found should not be tolerated.’

Commissioner and SERCO Chairman Kevin Beeston said: ‘During my time on the Commission, meeting vulnerable workers and hearing the evidence first-hand for myself, I have become increasingly surprised by my own and society’s ignorance of these issues.

‘It’s disappointing to see how low the morals of some unscrupulous employers can be, and it’s time society stopped turning a blind eye to these workplace abuses that are shaming the world of work and tarnishing the reputations of good employers.’

TUC General Secretary and Chair of the Commission Brendan Barber said, ‘All the Commissioners - whatever their backgrounds - were shocked at just how vulnerable some workers are in today’s Britain. Their treatment is a national scandal, and we need urgent action.

‘But we have to cut thought the sterile debate that has turned any proposal to help even the most exploited people at work into a pro-union, anti-business old Labour move. Good employers have nothing to fear - and much to gain - from policies that stop them being undercut by bad employers who break the law or use loopholes to get round it.’

The report says that vulnerable workers suffer because they do not know their rights, lack an escape route from vulnerable jobs, cannot get their rights enforced - and often suffer when they try to - and that they fall through gaps in employment law that mean they do not enjoy the decent minimum standards to which the Government is committed. The report reveals OECD research showing that the UK has less employment protection than any other advanced economy apart from the USA.

Among the recommendations made by the Commission’s report, available free on-line at www.vulnerableworkers.org.uk are

• To counter widespread ignorance of employment rights, particularly among vulnerable workers, there should be a major awareness programme and better funding of employment rights advice.
• To counter the lack of proactive and co-ordinated enforcement of employment rights, there should be more funding for enforcement agencies such as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the minimum wage enforcement unit of HMRC, changes in the law that will allow them to work together more closely and more proactive enforcement that targets bad employers without waiting for complaints from their insecure victims.
• Some straightforward breaches of employment rights, such as illegal deductions from pay packets, which currently can only be enforced by individuals taking difficult and slow Employment Tribunal cases should be policed by an agency such as HMRC’s minimum wage enforcement unit.
• A new Fair Employment Commission involving employers, unions and civil society groups should co-ordinate the work of enforcement agencies, monitor awareness of employment rights and make recommendations to Government.
• The Gangmasters’ Licensing Authority (GLA) regime should apply to other sectors where agencies use vulnerable workers as there is evidence of exploitative treatment in sectors that are not currently regulated such as care homes or construction.
• There should be a reform of employment status law that denies rights and any security to workers who do not count as employees as they do not have a contract of employment.
• Equal treatment for agency workers with permanent employees doing the same work.
• Changes in immigration law to reduce the vulnerability of migrant workers who raise complaints to losing their jobs and thus facing destitution.
• Vulnerable workers should be helped to move into better jobs, through more training - including ESOL for migrant workers - and a more flexible benefits system.

Commissioner Belinda Earl, Chief Executive, Jaeger, said: ‘During my work on the Commission I was able to meet with some of the UK’s most vulnerable workers in London. I was shocked that such poor practice still exists; one worker that I spoke to told me he had worked 70 hours a week, in a fast food takeaway, for 3 years without any paid holiday - and he was not even being paid the minimum wage. I also met with migrant domestic workers, who were being underpaid and exploited - and who faced physical and sexual violence from their employers. It is unacceptable that these practices exist today and more action is needed to prevent these extreme violations of employment law.’

FE Unions Reject Pay Offer

The six Further Education unions representing 250,000 members in England have today (May 1) rejected the employers (Association of Colleges) pay offer of 2.5%. The six trade unions - ACM, ATL, GMB, UCU, UNISON, UNITE - submitted a catch-up pay claim for 6% or £1,500, whichever is the greater. This would establish a minimum wage level of £7.38 for workers in FE.

Joint Trade Union side Secretary and UNISON National Officer, Chris Fabby, said: “We reject this offer outright. 2.5% is just not enough. This year, our members have been struggling to cope with huge hikes in the cost of essentials like fuel, food and housing.

“The employers must get back around the negotiating table with a more realistic offer. We need a fairer deal for the low paid who can earn as little as £12,738 per year.

“Last year workers in FE got a below inflation pay deal. If this happens again, we run the risk of prompting a recruitment and retention crisis.”

The offer covers all FE staff including lecturers, managers, learning support staff, librarians, IT specialists, technicians, professional staff, administrative and business support staff, cleaners, canteen staff and estate management staff.

Joint Trade Union Side Secretary and UCU Head of Further Education, Barry Lovejoy, said: “A pay increase of 2.5% just won’t make up for years of below-inflation awards or remedy the 6% FE-school teacher pay gap. And it doesn’t address the widespread dissatisfaction with poor pay in the face of increasing workload pressures demonstrated by the independent survey carried out recently for UCU.

“The employers need to go back to the drawing board and come up with an offer that will enable FE to avert a potential staffing crisis that could well de-rail the government’s skills strategy.”

End 30 Year Wait For New Bank Holiday

The TUC is today (Thursday) marking the 30^th anniversary of the creation of the May Day holiday - the last bank holiday to be introduced in the UK - by calling for a new autumn holiday to celebrate the great British tradition of volunteering.

The Callaghan Government introduced the May Day bank holiday on 1 May 1978. As people across the UK celebrated the extra day off work, the Bee Gees were top of the charts with Night Fever, Nottingham Forest were on the way to winning the First Division and a pint of bitter cost just 40p.

But while the worlds of football and music have moved on, the UK’s bank holiday allocation has been left behind. No new bank holidays have been introduced since 1978, leaving Britain with just eight, the second lowest in Europe.

The TUC believes that a new bank holiday would help repay employees for their part in building the UK’s economic success. The real value of the economy has doubled since 1978, but wages have not kept pace. If today’s workers had the same share of the economy that went to wages in 1978, they would each have an extra £2,339 per year - easily enough to pay for another bank holiday.

The TUC, along with leading voluntary organisations, want a new Community Day bank holiday in late October to celebrate and encourage volunteering and community activity.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “We’ve gone thirty years without a new bank holiday and the UK is now languishing behind the rest of Europe. People are crying out for a new bank holiday, a call that politicians should be listening to.

“A new bank holiday would give everyone much-needed time with friends and family. Timing it around late October would also create a welcome pit-stop to break the gruelling four-month stint between the August bank holiday and the Christmas break.

“But a new bank holiday should not just be a day off work, it should be a special day that brings the nation together. What better cause for us all to celebrate than our great British tradition of volunteering.”

The Community Day campaign is supported by the TUC, Volunteering England, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), Community Service Volunteers (CSV) and the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA).

The TUC has supported an early day motion (EDM 1400) calling for a new bank holiday. So far 55 MPs have signed the EDM (as of Monday 28 April). 

Better Occupational Health Needed

The TUC has today (Monday) called on UK employers to give better occupational health assistance to the two million employees who every year believe they have become ill as a result of their jobs.

To coincide with Workers’ Memorial Day - which this year focuses on good occupational health for all workers - the TUC and unionlearn, its learning and skills organisation, are publishing a new guide to occupational health for union safety reps.

Over the next year, the TUC hopes that around 15,000 workplace safety reps can be trained using the new educational workbook, Occupational Health: Dealing with the Issues. The reps will be able to use the guide to assess the extent of ill health in their workplaces and work with their employers to find the best ways of making the business a healthier place to work.

The TUC workbook says that apart from the huge personal cost to individuals when they become ill as a result of their work, 175 million working days were lost as a result of sickness absence in 2006, costing firms £650 per poorly employee.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “Workplaces where there are union safety reps tend to be both safer and healthier places. But the UK is currently facing an epidemic of occupational ill health. Many people are ill and in pain as a result of lifting injuries, slips and trips, stress and noise-induced hearing loss suffered either at, or caused by, their work.

‘Using this workbook, union reps can learn about all the aspects of occupational health. Then they can use it to encourage their employers to do much more to make employees feel they are getting a decent level of support from work when they are ill and again when they are on the road towards a full recovery.”

Worker’s Memorial Day is held on 28 April every year, when all over the world workers and their representatives conduct events, demonstrations, vigils and a whole host of other activities to mark the day. The day is also intended to serve as a rallying cry to ‘remember the dead, but fight like hell for the living.’

More Have Vocational Qualification Than Degree

The number of people with vocational qualifications is now higher than those with degrees but the awards still suffer from negative prejudice. In an article on their website, ATL report the findings of research carried out by Edexcel which shows 38% of the population having a vocational qualification and 26% having a degree.

Dissatisfaction Widespread Among FE Staff

A report published just a few days before today’s industrial action taken by members of the University and College Union (UCU), shows widespread dissatisfaction among FE staff. The report by the Learning and Skills Network (LSN), shows that:

• Only 39.1% of staff say that they would recommend their organisation as a good place to work and this drops to 31.1% among lecturers and teachers. Furthermore, many respondents (42.2%) said that they didn’t feel valued by their employer.
• A significant number of people (56%) reported that they don’t think they are adequately rewarded for their work. This rises to 60.9% among lecturers and teachers but drops to 34.6% among senior managers. By comparison, the majority of people (68.4%) say they are happy with their pension scheme.
• 21.9% of teachers and lecturers, and 35.8% of senior managers, say they are not able to take their full holiday entitlement.
• Only 7.4% of respondents do not work beyond their contracted hours. Out of the staff who said they often work beyond their contracted hours, 29% of teaching staff, 38% of managers and 63% of senior managers said they often worked more than 11 additional hours per week.
• 40% of people say that their organisation will tolerate managers or colleagues who bully others.
• Overall, 53.9% of people said they had been verbally abused by learners, with 37.4% of staff saying they had felt physically threatened by a learner.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the findings also reveal high levels of stress and job insecurity: Most staff (69.8%) say they feel too much stress in their job, with teaching staff and middle managers more likely than other groups to say they are stressed.

And reflecting the widespread instability caused by continual restructuring, 48% of staff said they do not feel they have job security, with teaching staff and middle managers feeling the least secure.

Further details can be found in the full LSN report, FE Colleges: the frontline under pressure.

Jumbo Jet Load of Workers Killed Each Fortnight

The equivalent of a jumbo-jet-load of passengers dies every fortnight in Britain because of the failure to ensure safe and healthy conditions in workplaces, RoSPA said as Workers’ Memorial Day approaches (April 28).

Roger Bibbings, Occupational Safety Adviser for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, said: “Because workers rarely die in high-profile disasters, their plight and the silent suffering of their families tends to go unnoticed.

“But if one jumbo jet crashed every two weeks killing all 400 people on board there would be a national outcry – and that is the rate at which workers are dying. Workers’ Memorial Day offers a chance to remember those who have been harmed at work and to redouble efforts to protect those who remain at risk.”

He said Government ministers claimed justifiably that reportable workplace injuries had come down and that the UK was now almost in pole position in the world when it came to accident rates. But the latest HSE figure of 241 notifiable deaths due to accidents to workers could disguise the true extent of the health and safety problem in the UK.

Over 100 members of the public (still under-reported) die annually in accidents connected with work activity. About 1,000 people die in work-related road accidents and many thousands suffer early death due to work-related health damage (estimates vary from 6,000 to 24,000 cases).

“By focusing only on accident deaths at the top of the casualty iceberg, there is a danger of losing sight of figures for the overall injury and ill-health toll which tend to remain below the water line,” Roger Bibbings said.

“There are more than 1.1 million work-related injuries annually – excluding road injuries – and about 2.2 million cases of ill health caused or made worse by work. In all, this is estimated to contribute to about 36 million lost working days.

“This is equivalent to more than 20 jumbos landing every day in the UK loaded with sick and injured people. And around the world more workers continue to be killed, injured or made ill by their work than all those who die in armed conflicts.

“For families and friends affected by each of these tragedies, their loss cannot be measured by statistics.

“At a time when it has become fashionable to poke fun at ‘elf and safety’, these stark figures should serve to remind everyone of the true extent of pain, suffering and loss due to the failure to manage risks associated with work.”

Wales Pay Claim Presented

Unions representing the majority of employees in further education colleges in Wales formally presented the 2008/9 pay claim to the employers’ organisation, fforwm, at a meeting of the Wales National Negotiating Committee on Wednesday. The claim, which had been approved by all of the FE unions in Wales, calls for a 6% pay increase and a minimum increase of £1,500, the removal of the bottom point on the management spine, an increase in holidays for managers, and for business support managers to be moved onto the management spine. The claim also seeks nationally agreed core conditions of service.

ACM General Secretary Peter Pendle, who chaired the staff side at the meeting, said “We believe that this is a very fair claim and were encouraged by the response of the employers at the meeting. We hope that we will be able to make much quicker progress this year so that the increase is paid to employees at the start of the academic year”. A response to the claim from fforwm is expected early in June.

Also represented at the meeting were ATL and UNISON. The UCU declined to attend as a result of the strike being held on the same day.

Protection For Women Undergoing IVF

The Eurpoean Court of Justice has confirmed that dismissal or unfavourable treatment of women undergoing IVF amounts to sex discrimination. In a case referred from Austria (Mayr v Backerei und Konditorei Gerhard Flockner OHG ECJ C-506/06, 26/2/08), the EJC said that the Pregnant Workers Directive only had effect from the moment of pregnancy, which in a case of IVF was when the fertilised ova was implanted.

However, the court felt it appropriate to conclude that the Equal Treatment Directive precludes the dismissal of a woman where it is established that the dismissal is based on the fact she had undergone IVF treatment.

Currently ACM is dealing with a case where a member undergoing treatment is facing questions about her commitment to her job, directly arising from her need to attend a fertility clinic. This recent ruling is therefore both welcome and timely.

Dealing With Mental Health Problems

Employment relations service Acas has issued advice on how to spot and deal with mental health problems at work. The advice comes ahead of Depression Awareness Week (21 – 26 April) which is focusing on employment this year.

Gill Trevelyan, Head of Training and Equality Services says: “Spotting and doing something about troubled employees is an important business skill. As well as being good managers in the traditional sense, we urge bosses to look out for early indicators before they develop into something more serious, like stress or depression. Healthy and content workers translate directly into productive employees.”

The advice also coincides with the release of Acas’ new free guide on Health, work & wellbeing.

UCU To Strike Before Negotiations Begin

College lecturers in England have voted to strike on Thursday 24 April in support of a demand to bring their pay up to that of schoolteachers. Over 27,000 lecturers in more than 250 colleges were balloted by the University and College Union (UCU). On a 38.6% turnout, 65.5% voted to support strike action.

Members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), who teach in schools, are also striking on Thursday 24 April over a separate pay claim.

In both schools and colleges, many teaching professionals believe their employers are ignoring their professional status and serving business interests at the expense of community needs. NUT, UCU and the National Union of Students recently launched a joint campaign ‘Our schools, our colleges, our communities’ to draw attention to threats to the quality of local, public education from college marketisation, ‘city academies’ and cuts in public services.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of UCU, said: “College lecturers feel undervalued, despite their successes, which the government has recognised.

‘The considerable difference in the average pay of lecturers and teachers doing the same work is grossly unfair.

‘It is more than four years since FE employers agreed to move lecturers to the same length pay scales as school teachers but 47% of colleges still haven’t done that. The treatment of FE staff is a scandal. Pay has been further eroded by below-inflation pay awards.

‘Further education is central to the government’s plans for reskilling the nation but colleges must also serve their communities, not simply be factories for qualifications. Lecturers are delivering. Now college employers must tackle the deep dissatisfaction amongst their staff.’

Responding to today’s announcement by the UCU, Sue Dutton, Association of Colleges (AoC), Acting Chief Executive, said: “Colleges are disappointed that the University and Colleges Union (UCU) has called its members out to strike on 24 April over the 2008/09 pay claim.

‘The action is unprecedented as it is being called before national pay negotiations have even begun. Despite the decision, AoC is still committed to national pay negotiations, which are due to start 1 May.”

None of the other five unions who are party to the national pay claim have held industrial action ballots.