Employees at the Office for National Statistics have narrowly voted in favour of a strike over a return to office mandate.
The ballot of members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union was announced last month.
In November 2023, employees at the ONS were told that they would need to spend 20% of the working week in the office from January, increasing to 40% from April.
The union responded that its members had built their lives around hybrid working, which had been running successfully since the start of the pandemic.
PCS said there had been “regular reassurances” that the arrangements would remain in place, and that the ONS had been “an example in best practice in flexible and sustainable ways of working”.
Public sector strikes
It said that management had presented no “evidence-based business case” for the policy U-turn, and refused suggestions from PCS and other public sector unions to consider a more gradual transition.
PCS said that 73.4% of members voted in favour of strike action, and 83.8% for action short of a strike. Turnout was 50%, the threshold for which a ballot can be successful.
Fran Heathcote, general secretary of PCS, said: “ONS bosses have seriously undermined the trust and goodwill of their staff by seeking to drive this policy through in such a heavy-handed way, heedless of the consequences.
“They now need to immediately pause implementation of the policy and talk to us about reaching a sensible resolution of this issue, which does not carelessly disadvantage staff.”
PCS has written to managers at the ONS asking them to arrange urgent talks to resolve the dispute. The union also is awaiting the results of a ballot across the civil service that could see 160,000 civil servants go on a national strike.
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