Strike action is back on at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) after the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) accused management of reneging on an agreement over working practices.
The PCS claims that up to 8,000 staff will walk out on Monday over the introduction of new working practices called LEAN.
Strike action was originally supposed to take place on 14 July, but was suspended after talks between the union and HMRC management.
The LEAN system measures the individual hourly output of staff, which the union claims is leading to excessive individual monitoring, a deskilling of work, and exposure to repetitive strain injury.
The PCS has called for the output of the team to be measured rather than the output of individuals.
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Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary said the system mirrored working practices designed by consultants for the car industry in the 1970s.
Staff were being “reduced to nothing more than robots”, he said.
