Romec Engineering Dispute: Further Strike Action, 21/22 July

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Letter to Branches




No. 629/2011
Ref: PTC/RE/dj/312
Date: 14th July 2011

TO ALL BRANCHES WITH POSTAL MEMBERS

Dear Colleague

RE: Romec Engineering Dispute: Further Strike Action, 21st & 22nd July

The Postal Executive has called a 48 hour stoppage of Romec Engineers in BSM, Fire and Security, BSI, Automation and Projects group commencing at 23:59 on Wednesday 20th July and concluding at 23:59 on Friday 22nd July.

In addition, the ban on attendance and callout on overtime has been extended until 4pm on 22nd August.

Romec continues to act in breach of national agreements on the use of information from vehicle trackers and handheld devices. Information is being used to monitor engineers on a daily – sometimes minute by minute – basis. Information has been used to discipline and to reduce pay, outside any procedure. Engineers have been put in a position of having to provide an explanation to their manager, with the default position that pay will be reduced if the manager doesn’t accept the explanation.

Romec is in open breach of the 2009 agreement governing use of information from Trackers, and has breached the Data Protection Act. The company is also in breach of the 2008 Attendance and Modernisation Agreement. It has proceeded with an unagreed redundancy exercise in breach of Managing the Surplus Agreement, (MSA –Romec’s version of MTSF) on terms which are worse than those in the MSA. This is despite the fact that the MSA redundancy terms are contractual and Royal Mail Group, Romec’s majority shareholder, committed in the 2002 agreement establishing Romec as a joint venture company to ensure that it upheld the provisions of the agreement.

In short, Romec has torn up all its agreements with CWU in its attempt to deliver the £10.6 million of savings demanded by Royal Mail Group this year as the price of the continuation of Romec’s contract with Royal Mail.

The Deputy General Secretary (Postal) Dave Ward has offered to meet with Romec Managing Director Stewart Davies in order to establish a basis for resolution of the dispute. His response is awaited.

The Union has raised Romec’s breach of the commitments contained in the 2002 agreement concerning application of the Managing the Surplus Agreement with Royal Mail Group. The response from RMG has been extremely disappointing. It appears that RMG has given Romec the green light to attack Union organisation in order to deliver the cuts that Royal Mail has demanded from its subsidiary. It is particularly disappointing in light of the Business Transformation Agreement that Royal Mail has clearly sanctioned behaviour in an associated company which amounts to a wholesale attack on the CWU and the collective bargaining process. We are seeking a meeting with RMG HR Director John Duncan.

Further communications will be issued direct to members next week.
Any enquiries should be addressed to Ray Ellis’s department, quoting reference PTC/RE/dj/312.
Email address: rellis@cwu.org

Yours sincerely

Ray Ellis,
Assistant Secretary