You may have seen and heard information in regards to the councils Job Promise. Below is a statement from the joint unions (UNISON, GMB, UNITE) regarding this:
Job Promise – cabinet report 01.04.15 – Click this link to read full document.
Jobs Promise Negotiated
No Compulsory Redundancies between 2015-2017
UNISON, Unite the Union and the GMB have been involved with negotiations with the Council on a jobs promise aiming to reduce the amount of workers being made redundant.
For the last few years union representatives have been frustrated by the Council’s failure to proactively avoid the need for redundancies to take place. We feel that in a number of restructures the Council only gave limited effort to avoid individuals being made redundant.
Unions have negotiated some safeguards to the ‘Jobs Promise’ to avoid possible problems so that it will work as follows:
- Anyone whose job is made redundant in the next two years will in the first instance be offered a ‘suitable alternative’ job, which should be on the same pay.
- For the first six months anyone redeployed will be offered training and support for the new role. We negotiated a guarantee that no one will be ‘performance managed’ for the first six months.
- Negotiations resulted in an agreement that if either the employee or employer thought the redeployment was not working at the six months point then voluntary redundancy could be enacted.
- The Council has agreed to reduce the use of agency and Templink workers.
- Job Descriptions may change as part of the annual appraisal but job groups or individuals have the right to union representation if necessary. Any changes to job groups will be through consultation with unions as normal.
The final proposal was only negotiated on 28 March and with the Council seeking to approve 1 April there was not sufficient time to conduct full members’ ballots. The Joint Trade Unions feel that this negotiated agreement is a step forward in trying to avoid unnecessary redundancies and we feel we have now obtained the sufficient safeguards to agree the paper.