Editors Blog

Something was stirring at the TUC Congress down in Brighton last week, and it wasn't just copious amounts of sugar being used to cover up the awful conference centre coffee.

Nope, a power struggle was emerging at the top of the trade union hierarchy, and it was even uglier than the fight for sandwiches at lunchtime.

Yes, that's right, you've missed it. You should have posted your Christmas cards last week.

The current stand-off between Royal Mail, the Communication Workers Union and now the organisers of a number of wildcat walkouts means 21st century Christmas shoppers may have to revert to the high street rather than rely on deliveries from online retailers.

News on Tuesday that employment relations minister Pat McFadden had rejected calls to play a bigger role in settling the dispute as well as the confirmation from the CWU of further action next week will be little comfort to those most affected by the industrial action.

Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) have finally agreed a deal to bring the long-running and bitter postal dispute to an end.

The proposed agreement will now be subject to a members' ballot, and barring an unexpected turn of events, looks likely to be accepted by the posties.

But what about the long-term damage done to the organisation? Both sides have indulged in a very public war of words, and it will take time for the scars to heal.

Miners, postmen and teachers strike occasionally. Railway workers strike all the time (I've just checked, some are on strike today).

Doctors, policemen and lumberjacks tend not to. Scriptwriters, in my humble opinion, also fall into this group. But when Perez Hilton starts blogging about Eva Longoria joining the picket lines you know the world's gone a little crazy.

How many migrant workers can fit into a white Transit van? Quite a large number according to UK leasing company, Lex.

As the debate of migrant workers continues, Lex has reported an increasing demand from migrant workers for used vans.

The reason: it is a vital ingredient for them to re-establish their trades in the UK.

Lex holds a number of van auctions each week across the UK and says it has seen a greater number of immigrants attending these sales and bidding on its vehicles in 2007.

It adds that the bulk of interest from immigrants is shown for vans at the budget end of the market, typically the older, higher mileage vehicles.

Sol Campbell - the man who left Arsenal to play football abroad and took a job at Portsmouth - has claimed that footballers' human rights are violated when supporters give them verbal abuse from the stands.

The ex England international this week called on governing body the FA to clamp down on supporters chanting abuse at players. They are professionals trying to do a job and being subjected to unfair criticism, he claimed.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has seemingly dispensed with his nicey-nicey image and has started talking tough to airline staff threatening to strike in a pay row.

In a letter to Virgin Atlantic cabin crew, Branson delivered a stark New Year message, telling them that if they didn't like the money on offer they should resign.

Members of the Unite union had voted for two 48-hour strikes later this month in protest over pay levels. The union claims Virgin crew are paid less than rivals such as British Airways.

Unite is calling for more government assistance to deal with the UK motor industry's employment issues.

The UK’s largest trade union, said that although 35,000 jobs have been lost in the UK’s automotive industry in the past 10 years the sector still employs 210,000 people in the design and manufacture of vehicles and components and contributes around £9bn added value to the economy annually.

Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite said that too many factories are closing, sometimes with companies turning their backs on the UK in search of cheaper labour elsewhere.

And its not just jobs that are suffering, British iconic car marques, Jaguar and Land Rover are currently being yo-yoed about after US firm Ford recently confirmed that it is in discussion with Indian car manufacturer, Tata Motors as a possible suitor.

Its almost ironic that Tata Motors has just launched the world's cheapest car. The so-called Nano will cost from £1,500.

Unite isn't without wit, however, as it has asked MPs to investigate the procurement record of their local authorities in buying UK built vehicles.

Its research reveals that 74% of vehicles procures and used by central and local government bodies are not produced in the UK.

I forgot exactly how much the two sides hate each other. They're up there with Hamas and the Israeli government, with Fischer and Spassky, with Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner.

My predication last month that a new one-off commission comprising unions and business leaders could resolve the stand-off on agency workers' rights now appears wishful thinking, naive even.

The news that Acas staff are to strike in a row over pay is a) massively embarrassing for the service's management and b) deeply ironic.

As PCS union chief Mark Serwotka pointed out: "The failure of any pay offer and the lack of substantive negotiations have forced the very people who resolve industrial disputes into voting for strike action themselves."

But in an unexpected secondary irony, ex-Gate Gourmet HR director Andy Cook has offered his words of wisdom on the dispute. You may remember that Cook was in charge of HR at the airline caterer in summer 2005 when it all kicked off at Heathrow airport with the unions.

Picked up on an interesting blog posting about whether employment blacklists that target trade unionists and other workplace 'agitators' exist.

The Socialist Worker has previously reported that big firms in the construction industry drew up lists of so-called troublemakers to prevent them getting work across the industry.

The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 is supposed to make it illegal to refuse employment on the grounds of union membership.

Posting a comment on the blog, Ian Manborde, a lecturer in trade union studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, said the legislation had been ineffective at preventing abuse.

The proposed closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland at the beginning of next week joined the 10p tax rebellion, the credit crunch and bulimic John Prescott's forthcoming memoirs in the queue of problems now stretching from the door of No.10 round the corner on to Whitehall.

Once again it is pensions that are at the heart of the problem. Grangemouth's 1,200 workers are angry about plans to cut the value of their scheme, and plans to close the final salary scheme to new employees.

At 71 years since they last did so, oil refinery workers fall into one of my categories of workers that rarely strike, but they are one of those groups for which the ramifications across the economy are huge and immediate.

New London Mayor Boris Johnson has been in the job for less than a week and he already seems to be on a collision course with Tube unions.

Part of his election manifesto was to try to broker a no-strike deal with the RMT union and other rail unions to prevent the endless cycle of Tube strikes, threats of Tube strikes and general bad feeling between union chiefs and management.

But no sooner had Boris got his feet under the desk at City Hall, then RMT leader and Millwall fan Bob Crow said union members would be "insane" to surrender their democratic rights to withdraw their labour. "The RMT wants good industrial relations with the Mayor, but it will never enter into a no-strike agreement," he said (probably quite loudly).

Other union leaders have been equally as dismissive. Keith Norman, boss of train drivers' union Aslef warned that Boris would be heading for "mass confrontation" if he didn't back down.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith took an absolute battering during her keynote speech at this morning's Police Federation conference.

Her decision to cut police pay from 2.5% to 1.9% in last year's pay deal was simply unforgivable in police officers' eyes - all four hundred pairs of them staring back at her on the lonely stage.

Abuse was hurled from officer after officer queuing up to ask her why she had cheated them out of the pay deal they had been expecting and had been agreed from the independent arbitration ruling.

Cheat! Fraud! Betrayed! As each word was shouted so cheers and jeers came from the rest of the delegates. All that was missing was the 'Ding Ding' of a boxing bell. 

The Federation's chairman Jan Berry, who will retire at this week's conference, got in on the act too. Berry's opening remarks to the delegates included alluding to the fact Smith's role as home secretary was on the ropes.

"Home Secretary this is my sixth and last Annual Conference Speech. So much has happened. Two prime ministers and counting, four home secretaries [she left a massive pause here], four police ministers, five police bills..." and so on.

So the Royal Mail has turned itself around. Four years ago, almost 12,000 of its employees were absent at any one time. Since 2004, the group has reduced its absence rates from 7% to 4%, saving it an estimated £227m.

The government now wants the worst offending sectors for absenteeism to replicate the Royal Mail's absence management model, believing that the UK economy could save £1.45bn a year through reduced salary and temporary worker costs, and increased productivity.

But does one model fit all organisations? Would what worked for the Royal Mail really reap the same rewards in the NHS or central government?

Possibly not. For one, the Royal Mail spent £46m on health and wellbeing activities to improve attendance and in the past it has offered employees the chance to enter a draw to win a car or holiday vouchers if their attendance record was 100%.

Not all organisations have access to such a budget or the willingness from their top ranks to invest such a sum in proactively looking after staff.

It's also a question of creating the right culture. However much your organisation spends, unless line managers take charge of managing absence and create an environment where staff want to come to work - as the Royal Mail has also clearly achieved - then absence will continue to be an issue.

I'm with Ben Willmott at the CIPD on this one: "As long as incentives for absence are part of a whole package... they can create a buzz around the importance of managing absenteeism," he said recently.

After all, if the only reason your staff are coming in is on the offchance they might win a car, you need to take a serious look at your work culture.

For those of you slightly bemused by the relationship between wages and the effect it has on inflation, my colleague Sheila Atwood on XpertHR's Employment Intelligence blog gives a good explanation.

Chancellor Alistair Darling reiterated his call for pay restraint earlier this week, and with inflation running at an 11-year high of 3.8%, workers and unions will be demanding higher pay deals.

But as Sheila points out, the next big round of pay deals is scheduled for January 2009, with inflation widely expected to be on a downward curve by then.

Writing exclusively for Personneltoday.com, Jim Savege, the lead on pay at the Public Sector People Managers' Association, said this week's public sector strikes demonstrated a real need for pay modernisation in local government and beyond.

But while trade unions are determined to make their point over low pay for their members, the immediate challenge is settling this year's disputes before employers can even contemplate looking ahead to 2009.

Trade unions have upped the ante ahead of their meeting with Labour Party chiefs at Warwick University this coming weekend. The policy forum/beano is where unions traditionally outline their demands to the government for new workers' rights.

Top of the list? Sack business secretary John Hutton. Reports in the press claim senior union official can't stand to be in the same room as him and want prime minister Gordon Brown to give him the boot.

An unnamed unionist said there had been a complete "breakdown in relations" with Hutton because of his perceived pro-business leanings. In a speech in May, he said the government was satisfied it had got the balance of employment legislation right.

This angered unions who accused him of "losing touch with reality", and pledged to fight for stronger laws.

The story has got political and union bloggers speculating as to what might happen.

Civil servants' union the PCS has posted a five-minute video on YouTube to help get its argument across in the long-running dispute over public sector pay.

The film features numerous public sector workers describing their predicament inter-cut with  Mark "I'm angry" Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS, questioning the discrepancies between public and private sector pay rises.

Jennifer, an admin officer, makes the point that while MPs receive a £24,000 expense account, she earns just £15,000 per year for a a 37-hour week.

It may not be the best argument for better public sector pay but the emotion with which it's relayed makes it pretty compelling.

Could this be the future of industrial relations? Upon writing this post, this clip had had 637 views since it was posted on 2 September, so perhaps not. Nevertheless it does start to show the internet can be used to garner public support for a cause that might otherwise create a negative reaction...