BT union wants pay dispute talks with telco's largest shareholders The union representing BT Group workers protesting over their latest pay award are trying to pull as many levers as possible to force further negotiations, including setting up meetings with the telco's biggest investors. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) previously told BT that the strike action on July 29 and August 1 …
... CWU may find investors more interested in dividends.
What? No, can't be.
Absolutely unheard of. 8^D !!!!!
Seriously now ...
Of course BT must prioritise between shareholders or workers.
And it will: with the short-sightedness most corporations usually have, it will do so prioritising the shareholders' interests.
I have a feeling than CWU will not get anywhere unless they stop BT dead in it's tracks for a week and then there's a chance the government sides with the corporation of the grounds of ... whatever.
Remember Thatcher and the coal miners?
CWU are wrong to expect any help from the government or parliament, they should check the list of donors to both parties and see how BT probably made interesting donations to both Tory and Labour.
O.
It is going to get interesting with the CWU also having to concurrently handle the Postal Workers strike.
Given the CWU claim 189,492 active members(*) of which circa 110,000 are employed by Royal Mail and circa 40,000 at BT, I suspect the CWU are playing both of their high-value cards this summer.
(*)Down from a peak of circa 285,000 in 2000.
El Reg: Please stop this recent habit of talking about 'unionized' workers, this is not 1950s America!
Back to this thread:
One of the other problems of turning to the government is that the UK hasn't really got one at the moment, just two potential PMs vying to appear the most 'conservative' in front of their mates.....
Their current editor has decided to enforce an American style guide across the board because... I dunno, reasons. I've no idea why, he's not American, maybe he thinks it makes them down with the cryptobros or something. It is quite irritating, not least for an apparently UK-based publication to write about UK stuff from the perspective of "other". At least they haven't descended to Capitalising Every Word In The Article Titles (yet).
... someone clearly thinks that it is at least America ...
Well ...
... someone clearly thinks that it is at least America the United States ...
There you go, fixed it for you.
English is not the only language spoken in the Americas.
Which is actually a continent many times referred to as America.
The United States is in the Americas, it is not the Americas.
In spite of how much they want it to be.
O.
"with the short-sightedness most corporations usually have, it will do so prioritising the shareholders' interests."
That is self-contradictory. They can't be short sighted and also prioritise shareholder returns. Look up 'net present value'. The value of a share includes long-term expectations, so short-term gains with attendant long-term losses will depress the value (absent a bubble, of course) and harm shareholder returns.
Prioritising the shareholders' interests is the short-sightedness I refer to.
BT's workforce (or any corporation's) is not just an asset (like they like to call employees these days) it is their most valuable one.
There is no BT without BT's workforce and its accrued experience.
If you do not take proper care of it you will eventually lose part, most or all of it.
What value will the bloody shares have then?
O.
Remember Thatcher and the coal miners?
Very well, and it wasn't the same situation. It may have started off as a protest against the ending of a dying industry, but Scargill hated the Tories with a passion and soon realised he could use the striking miners as cannon fodder in a war to bring down the government. No elected government could tolerate that, and although the miners were being told that "one more push" could get Thatcher out, the reality in the rest of the country is that people were fed up with unelected unions trying to control how the country was run.
It's no surprise that the breakaway union, objecting to being told by their leaders to strike when they had voted against it, called itself the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Remember also that after the government faced down the protests, they won another landslide election victory two years later.
I won't bring up that Brexit thing and the dire consequences it has had ...
Dire consequences?
It's not even two years since it happened, far too soon to draw any conclusions on its outcome. Most countries that leave a larger political group take a decade or more to re-establish themselves, you probably won't be able to make any full analysis of Brexit until 2030 at least.
For the moment it's clear that there have been some issues where things weren't thought through, they need to be worked on, but most of the doom & gloom predicted by the remainers has not come to pass.
they won another landslide election victory two years later.
Looking at the results, Thatcher wasn't that popular in Wales or North Yorkshire, was her?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo
Yeah, that name is a dead giveaway.
Oh, it doesn't mean that the union was democratic, few are, but the fact that the breakaway miners felt the need to use the word shows that they did not feel that Scargill & the NUM were doing much more than paying lip service to democracy.
"the reality in the rest of the country is that people were fed up with unelected unions trying to control how the country was run."
And look how that has turned out. Now the country is run by incompetent, lying crooks propped up by shifty unelected overseas oligarchs who give bungs to the Tory party. Arise Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation. Once the cheque cleared.
You're also wrong about the UDM, one of Thatcher's useful idiots in the miners' strike. They were not "told by their leaders to strike when they had voted against it". Nottingham's miners split from the NUM because there hadn't been a ballot for a national strike. They hadn't voted against anything because there was no vote. That's what lead to the UDM. Which made no difference. The UDM got fucked over by Thatcher every bit as badly as the NUM did.
BTW the UDM was Democratic in the same sense as East Germany called itself the German Democratic Republic. Its leadership was corrupt. One of them got convicted of defrauding a UDM charity.
...for large-scale colleague absences to minimize any disruption for our customers. We kept the network running safely and effectively, as we do every day, and there were no national incidents or outages."
And there's the rub right there - the shareholders will see that and will be thinking "So, what are we paying these 'engineers' for then anyway?", and fire the lot of them. After all, there's nothing larger than a headcount reduction to ensure a large-scale colleague absence, is there?
Besides, if they do encounter any problems afterwards, they can just hire one of their many friends consultancy companies to plug the gaps, like it should be done, old chap, dontchyerknow?
You know it's coming.
Probably because if nothing physical goes wrong during the day the strikes happen things will keep working. However during the days the engineers were on strike the number of jobs that required an engineer onsite must have been close to zero. I'm obviously not party to what BT/Openreach did during those days but I'm guessing the engineers they did have were not out installing new customers. I'm guessing also faults were probably being prioritized so faults affecting lines with tight SLAs would have had the engineers available out, but if your broadband line had gone down on the day you would have been waiting longer. Now imagine if the BT/Openreach strike had lasted a few weeks or a month. Limited installs(Although I know last time I moved they used a contractor), days/weeks extra for faults to be investigated. No movement on rolling full fibre out.
Quote:
"And there's the rub right there - the shareholders will see that and will be thinking "So, what are we paying these 'engineers' for then anyway?", and fire the lot of them. After all, there's nothing larger than a headcount reduction to ensure a large-scale colleague absence, is there?"
Ahh an idea worthy of "sack all the skilled staff"
Which works fine right upto the moment the shit hits the fan
I heard the story long ago of a company who went down that route, got the skilled staff in to set up the machining cells, then sacked all the skilled staff and hired min wagers to run the cells.
Made a shed load of money for the company right upto the moment one of the unskilled staff changed a broken tool over and put it in the wrong slot.
750 000 quid later in repairs alone plus 2 weeks down time and it was pointed out to the manglers it would have been cheaper to keep the skilled staff.......
As a retired Openreach employee I wish to give my two penn'orth worth.
The colleagues I worked with as both exchange and customer engineers worked bloody hard in sometimes difficult circumstances (yes a few didn't and you know who you are). Always chased and tracked by the "Tracker Sacker" installed in the last decade to "ensure your safety when working alone" in your van. As an example, phone call from manager (not engineer, parachuted in from uni with some business qual.) "Mark I see your at Asda Eastlands, why are you there? You should be attending an urgent ISDN fault!
My response "Yes I'm at Asda, in the middle of rejointing an ISDN pair to the external cash machines".
Management should be made to climb 8 metre poles in the middle of winter and resolve cable faults at the top, whilst trying to avoid mild electric shocks (again ISDN ccts. are the worst). Then we may see some sense and proportion in the CWU's claim for BT workers.
Seconded about the old school BT engineers.
Years ago I had a workshop off the beaten track. Bad guys came after dark and pulled down the outside telephone cables - thinking that'll put the burglar alarms out of action.
Then broke in to the workshops. Of course the Red Care system kicked in right away, and the cops and I were on the scene right away.
The point of this is: I phoned BT and an engineer came out within an hour or two. Now this was a Saturday night, after midnight, horribly cold and wet, the rain was pouring down as it only can in the Scottish wilderness.
The engineer who came out - this was his first call out since returning after a heart attack, over 60 years old, up a telephone phone for a couple of hours in that weather, and only me and an umbrella to protect him if the bad guys had come back.
I won't ever put down those old school engineers.
I'm sure he never had the pay he deserved.
"first call out since returning after a heart attack, over 60 years old [...] I'm sure he never had the pay he deserved."
In those days he'd have had a year or two off on full pay to recover, so...
It annoys the hell out of me when people who enjoy the benefits of permanent full-time employment complain they aren't getting as much money as those who take on the risks of self-employment. (It also annoys the hell out of me when contractors enjoying the higher pay complain about not getting the benefits of full time employment, to be fair.)
Economists try to value stable, long-term employment at a good wage - as compared to self-employment, contracting, etc. You can get an idea of what the value is by asking people how much extra they'd want to make before they'd give up employment and go self-employed, and it turns out to be well over 30% on average. That means a 50k salary in that kind of job is really worth at least 65k to those who want that security, the fixed working hours, and so-on.
Honestly I needed a good laugh and this was it.
The utter naivete of a union leader, who spends all their time talking to likeminded individuals, thinking they can go direct to major shareholders and get more money. They must come from the Jeremy Corbyn school of economics, or the Vladimir Putin School of building friendships.
It would be great to be a fly on the wall as long as earplugs were provided for the shareholders laughs and the unions cries.
" thinking they can go direct to major shareholders and get more money"
But of course they can, as long as management are wrong and they are right about the value of the workers they represent. If they're wrong, they'll be politely ignored, of course. But if they're right, and can make a persuasive case - which is easier when you're right - then they will have no trouble at all persuading the shareholders to do what will increase the value of the shares.
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