A round-up of HR-related stories in today’s newspapers.
Union leaders will today endorse plans for the biggest show of industrial muscle for two decades, including coordinated industrial action, days of protest and national demonstrations against the Government’s austerity measures, reports the Independent.
Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, will evoke the spirit of the poll-tax protests at the opening of the TUC’s annual conference in Manchester today. The campaign of resistance is expected to begin next month, on the eve of Chancellor George Osborne’s comprehensive spending review, and come to a head in spring 2011 as the impact of the cuts begins to be felt.
British Airways has asked call-centre staff to collect complaints by passengers about cabin crew discussing strike action with customers or making “adverse comments” about the airline, according to the Guardian.
The carrier’s inflight customer experience unit, which manages flight attendants, has launched a trial in which examples of “inappropriate comments” to passengers will be relayed to staff. A memo to call centre employees states: “The inflight customer experience team would like to track details of when passengers have made complaints about our crew that are deemed serious enough to take disciplinary action.”
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The system which allows some criminal convictions to become “spent” needs to be reformed to help ex-offenders back into work, a charity urges today. Nacro is launching a campaign to amend the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and will present its report to MPs today, the Guardian reports.
The charity says that the act is out of date and out of tune with the Government’s desire to get more people off benefits and back into work. Nacro will present MPs with its Change The Record report which sets out proposals to shorten the period of time before some convictions become spent and, therefore, do not have to be disclosed to employers.
