The CWU has been in discussions with BT, Openreach and EE to try and make progress on the wide range of issues affecting your future.
Although BT initially refused to engage meaningfully, the Count Me In campaign has created leverage and BT has now agreed to suspend all redundancies whilst we continue to discuss and try to find a way forward, this has been given on the condition that we postpone our industrial action ballot during the ongoing talks. The exact details of the suspension of the redundancies, are:
- No compulsory redundancies
- No further team members will be put at risk of compulsory redundancy
- Stop any further announcements of building closures or transformation changes that could lead to potential redundancies
- No-one is detrimentally impacted as a result of the suspension of redundancy
- A commitment to meaningful intervention to resolve the ongoing RPE dispute
This is a significant move and has been reached through your campaigning efforts and has put pressure on the company to listen to CWU members. Collectively the CWU has forced BT to shift its position and engage with us following our consultative ballot and we have now pushed them further to call a pause to redundancy on the eve of our industrial action ballot. Over the next three weeks we will seek to make significant progress on six key areas:
- Redundancy Process
- Strategic Resourcing
- Better Workplaces
- Terms and Conditions
- Job Evaluation and Grading
- Pay
We have made it clear to BT that if we are not able to make the necessary progress over the next few weeks, we fully intend to go ahead with our industrial action ballot at the beginning of June 2021.
In the meantime, please continue speaking to your colleagues about the issues facing you in the workplace, and the need to be prepared to turnout a resounding ‘yes’ in an industrial action ballot if talks are not successful.
Standing together we can win this dispute.
Yours sincerely
Andy Kerr
Deputy General Secretary (T&FS)