BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees Emotions are running high at BT over the Brit telco's refusal to "improve their derisory and insulting" pay offer to manager grade staff, according to John Ferrett, national secretary at union Prospect. As revealed by The Register at the end of last month, the union criticized the former state owned network operator for giving …
I would have expected BT to be spreading the Openreach approach to call handling across the entire business, namely no call centres and a Chat bot that provides no way to actually talk to a human. It seems e only way to actually talk to any one at OR is to get an engineer to visit any get them to call their supervisor. (Currently trying to resolve an “Internet upgrade” none of the ISPs serving a site admit to knowing anything about and the OR communication doesn’t name the ISP they are doing the work on behalf of.
Good news for BT then. BT's total dividend was around 8p per share. Total outstanding shares are 9.78bn, so total dividend is £780m, approximately.
BT has a total workforce of around 91,000, so unless they are being paid £8.5k each on average, BT spends way more on staff salaries than dividend.
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LOL, that is beyond insulting. Hell no it should not be accepted. That joke of an offer should be soundly launched into the sun with extreme prejudice.
Global inflation has been running into the double digits. Official numbers are an outright lie by very large discrepancies. In the USA, it is officially a single-digit, but my bills say a min of 30% inflation is the real number. I have no idea what it is in GB, but it has to be near that as well.
So hell no. In fact, some old fashioned labor action is called for.
You have incorrect equated/linked economic inflation to employment value.
BT is reducing the workforce as they are both no longer required and many of the skills they need going forward are neither in short supply nor are they now specialist in nature.
Therefore the link between inflation and their value has been broken.
The reevaluation that needs to happen is that they need to count themselves lucky to even have a job at this point + that huge BT pension...
Please tell me which planet you are on ... where skills are worth more than managers pay !!!
I know that is how it SHOULD work BUT I have very rarely seen it unless it is a small company where the SKILLS are 'seen' to pull in the revenue.
Most companies that are big enough to support a Management structure, the Managers think that they are WORTH more than the 'Grunts' at the coalface.
:)
The give away in the article that this is about “manager entitlement” is:
“ Members will find it deeply frustrating that the company are refusing to improve an offer that on average is worth a third of that offered to team members, but is also worth nothing at all to nearly five thousand managers and professionals.”
That attitude is the difference between manglement and management. I've come across far more of the former than the latter, sadly. Sounds like BT mostly have the former type running the show.
The best managers are the ones that appear when their seniority is needed to annoy or cajole other idiots into getting what their team needs to do their job, and otherwise leave them alone. Likewise ensuring their team doesn't get dragged into the game of pass-the-fuckup-parcel when one of the erstwhile manglers inevitably causes something to go wrong.
The best managers are the ones that appear when their seniority is needed to annoy or cajole other idiots into getting what their team needs to do their job
Proper managers have to do two things:
1) Ensure that the crap that falls from above impacts the team as little as possible.
2) Ensure that the team has what it needs in order to do the job (could be technology, could be time, could be information, could be support & training..).
That's it. I was taught that by one of the very few outstanding managers I've had and, in my brief management career, I tried to do it.
Sadly, a lot of the managers I've had fail at one or both of those. The really bad ones make no pretense of doing either and don't appear to have heard of the maxim "praise in publc, correct in private".
Management absolutely is a specialist skill.
It’s just that (in technical fields at least) it’s orthogonal to the skills of those managed and not neccesarily (or in the tech field often) more valuable or harder to come by, making it doubly stupid and frustrating that management is depressingly often the only career path available to senior technical staff.
The result of this is a middle management class packed with people who (again depressingly often) hate their jobs, aren’t terribly good at them, and get far too involved and “hands on” in the work they’re supposed to be facilitating. I consider myself extremely lucky to have ended my career working for a company who (while not neccesarily perfect in every regard) were prepared to be creative with roles, job titles, and pay scales because I am in no doubt that I would have ended up amongst that number…
One of the things Fred Brooks advocated in The Mythical Man Month was parallel technical and managerial career ladders, with equivalent rungs being equal in terms of prestige and compensation. Like most of the conclusions in that book, still relevant 50 years later and still just as widely ignored by almost all companies.
Ah, this is where your understanding of a Manager is lacking.
Due to the unique way in which BT manages staff, and pay, all technical people that are not graduates are 'managers'. So to answer your question, all technical experts are managers.
The only place where normal management happens is in call centres essentially.
"Revenue down, pay rises down, payments to shareholders and the board up, business is good for some !"
Profits up, 12% after tax or more than 20% before tax. Dividend up 2%. Pay up by 1%+£1000, which unless you are on above £100k/year is more than 2%. Seems like business is better for the staff than the shareholders there.
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Prospect are the biggest joke in union history. They literally take the money from staff and do nothing in almost every case. Sadly we can't change to cwu. BT know this.
I.e. every time prospect get rejected they just bend over and say 'sorry we tried, please continue giving us £25 a month'
But on the actual topic of pay, the reason why the BT response is they went to all the major consultancy firms, be asked what the going rate is for a given role and picked the lowest. Then they give 90% of staff a role name that ensured they get no pay rise and has nothing to do with their actual job.
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