Fujitsu scrapping fuel card benefit to cut costs, threatens dissenters with fire and rehire Fujitsu wants to tighten the group's corporate belt by removing the benefit fuel card afforded to hundreds of UK staff, and anyone resisting could potentially be fired and rehired on new contractual terms. Employees were notified of the proposal on 15 January and employee reps were elected at the end of that month. The window …
I would have thought that it would be trivial for Fujitsu to make a one-off payment to 'buy out' fuel card holdouts, rather than threaten with dismissal?
Also, I thought that one of the main benefits of fuel cards is that the staff don't have to dick about with expense claims. I urge any Fujitsu employee asked to sign new terms to ask to have included a guaranteed 0.5 hours per week for filling in expense claims - or guaranteed secretarial support (i.e. just stick the receipts in an envelope) - and report back as to what response they get. :-)
"Also, I thought that one of the main benefits of fuel cards is that the staff don't have to dick about with expense claims. "
Yes, this. Also, use of the company fuel card for personal mileage is a taxable "benefit in kind" so you still need to record your miles driven on business and subtract that from the total to get the private mileage. You then pay per mile for the private mileage or you get taxed on the equivalent amount.
The only real benefit is that fuel cards generally pay for fuel at a fixed rate, whatever the price on the pump at the filling station so the user can conveniently fill up on the motorway without worrying too much about a full tank costing 10 quid more than at the local supermarket.
Using official government figures for mileage claims can mean, if paying for your own fuel, you need the cheapest you can find and a light foot on the pedals or you might end up paying for the privilege of driving for business reasons. The fuel card takes away that risk.
Yes, but.
I don't know if things have changed, but the way it used to work was that the tax was based on the car. If there was no car (just a card) then a "standard" fleet car was used as the yardstick.
Back in the day, this was a 1.8 litre Mondeo (IIRC). A mate bought a Land Rover Discovery 4.0 V8 to go with his fuel card. It's amazing how much petrol one of those will drink when it's driven by someone who isn't paying for it and thus has no aversion to heavy use of the "lead welly".
"£1.241m in fiscal '19; £1.031m in fiscal '20; and £419m in the current financial year ending 31 March."
That's a massive jump, or we're the '.' not unit separator, so was £1241m, so should have been a ',' for the UK, which would be a massive saving.
Or if its correct, why does 2021 have a ~350 fold increase in savings?
They've fixed the numbers in the article now. Basically this years was 419k not 419m. So in other words each of the 200 employees with this card where spending on average 5-6k per year on it.
The stupid thing is that removing this wont save them any money. Unless Fujitsu have clear evidence that these cards are being abused, then removing them means they need to up the pay of the affected workers to cover the difference (because people are not going to travel for work out of their own pocket. especially 6k worth!), which is unlikely, or more likely, the workers will have to put in expense claims for the fuel.
The thing is, that submitting expenses is hugely time consuming, the worker will lose an hour, the secretary will lose an hour, HR will lose an hour, finance will lose an hour. All of that in non-productive time that you still have to pay for. So you're taking money out of one column to make the numbers look better but costing yourself 3 times the price in lost productivity.
But I guess what can you expect with Beancounters in charge...
As there's a quote from employee rep saying that the fuel cards were used in lieu of pay rises in the past, it seems those could be used for personal travel and the removal therefore translates to a salary cut
I've been on the pointy end of a similar situation, where several benefits were presented as better than pay rises (they effectively were), only to be subtracted later, when the company were bought by a larger competitor who decided to cut costs. It sparked anger amongst the workforce and definitively led to more costs being cut, as many decided to part ways with the company (myself included)
"Final salary pensions have never been anything other than pretty much a ponzi/pyramid scheme where subsequent staff pay the pension burdens of previous staff."
Err, no. That's just what employers (who don't want to run them because the liabilities appear on their balance sheets) want you to think. In reality, the rate of return required to adequately fund a DB scheme is trivially low (c.5%).
Yes, funding schemes are available and possible, however with a growing number of retirees requiring pensions invested in at their final salary level, it is not sustainable for any organisation other than one that is perpetually growing. While there is some financial similarity between employer contributions and employee pension investment schemes, they are not comparable. Employer contributed pensions scale with the organisation and the people, pension fund schemes do not.
None of this was helped, of course, by the government's decision to change the law and allow companies to raid, which often amounted to effectively stealing from, the pension scheme funds for whatever purpose they feel fit - such as executive bonuses followed by the collapse of the organisation.
I've heard of this before. Something given to the staff in lieu of hard cash pay rises... and then later down the line, taken away as it's not part of the actual contract... and no recompense made to the staff for the decision. And it's basically legal as the benefit isn't usually written in to the recompense part of the contract so there's nothing the work force can do about it.
At the end of the day, this is going to leave some staff worse off. Fujitsu need to step up to the plate and fill the hole they're making in some people's livelihoods here. Unfortunately, if history of other companies proves, they probably won't. I mean, if they did, would this have been such a big issue in the first place?
Agreed (and upvoted). It'd be nice to have a way to retract a vote. For those occasions when you see a comment that makes you think "I agree with your first few points, but why did you then have to ruin it by throwing in a gratuitous political remark at the end" - too good to downvote, too tricksy to upvote...
Another (exceedingly minor) niggle I have with the voting system is that - here on a desktop browser, at least - if the up/down arrows are just above the bottom of the browser window, in the location where the red "Thanks. Your vote will be recorded" banner appears, then you can't click the arrows at all. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?
It's almost like that red banner is present-but-invisible-until-you-vote, blocking access to any arrows that would be under it. It's such a drag to have to scroll the page down by half an inch or so in order to vote, the admins have failed, I am disgusted and will be cancelling my subscription forthwith, general fall in standards, etc etc...
But in this case it seems it is in the contract as Fujitsu need to change it they can't just remove the benefit. They have to issue a new contract which the employee has to sign.
If the employee won't sign and Fujitsu fire to rehire Fujitsu leave themselves open to a unfair dismissal claim as covered in the sidebar to the article.
That's a very good point. It gets more confusing when you consider "implied contractual terms" or, "custom and practice" which are things not explicitly written into the contract, but are practices that have been going on for so long that they are as good as in ink. It all gets messy.
https://app.croneri.co.uk/feature-articles/implied-contractual-terms
That's an idea, business trips restricted to very near home or encompassing over ight stays for recharging. Why not invest in the proven fuel from air and save the co2 without replacing billions of cars? Can you imagine how long it will take for Africa, India and China to go electric? Fuel from air and they could be green immediately. The technology is proven to eork
But don't they run a lottery in cities to see who they hand out car licences to. A few a year because basically the roads can't actually take any more cars.
Google Beijing licence lottery
They might have a huge number of electric cars, but per head of population I bet it is tiny scraps compared to the number of people who don't have cars at all.
Except that replacing ANY existing car with a new one, no matter how it is powered, IS MORE POLLUTING than continuing to use a car that already exists. Because more pollution is caused by manufacture than use.
The entire motor vehicle industry is based on planned obsolescence and a maintenance cartel - talk to a Tesla owner you have to pay a licence charge to upgrade and fix bugs on the electronics, no electronics = dead car. I'd much rather have an 80's/90's vehicle with electronic ignition and fuel injection than the unmaintanable-by-a-human modern car.
The biggest problem was caused by idiot politicians who encouraged diesel engines in Chelsea tractors, used in already polluted environments to do a few miles a week. This is not what a diesel engine is good at.
Modern electric motors are typically 85-90% efficient and modern car engines are around 30-35% efficient. However this is not the entire story, for example how efficient is the electrical storage of the electric car, and what is the environmental impact of the creation of this battery and the recyling/disposal of it in a few years? How efficient is the charging of the electric car battery, and how efficient is the electric network in delivering electricity to the charger? How efficient is the generation of the electricity in order to do all this? Including impacts such as plant building, maintenance and fuelling. The infrastructure for petroleum derivative engines is all in place already and the delivery process for the fuel is very efficient. The extraction and generation of the fuel is less so, but it's called a petro-chemical industry for a reason, not just a petroleum-fuel industry, and a lot more than just fuel is produced out of crude oil and this side of the industry is just as critical.
My point is that there's lots to consider beyond solely electric motor vs internal combustion energy efficiency. The electical generation and grid infrastructure to deliver electricity to charge widespread electric cars usage just isn't in place yet. The energy storage technology for electric cars is still very primitive, there is no feasible rapid charge system in place (how many of us have three phase electicity to the home), what little infrastructure there is in place is often bespoke and brand specific. Arguably we really need standardised easily replaceable battery packs rather than cables and sockets on every driveway, and that would require multi-government pressure on the electric car industry to do this and this could only happen once the technology was there which makes this possible - currently energy density is so low that the batteries are often built into the entire chassis of the vehicle.
It is quite possible to create fuel from air. It does, however, require a lot of energy to do so and where does this come from?
And before the conspiracy nut-jobs and perpetual motion machine afficionados strike... no, it is not possible to use fuel created from air to power the creation of this fuel in anything other than a very rapidly reducing amount at which point the process would stop very quickly.
Simple - it doesn’t.... and most times prior on a garage when asked for the reg they either type it in off the fuelcard or took your word.
The ‘evidence’ - if anyone at your company looks - is in the mileage/consumption data from the fuel card provider so if you are skimming ... it’s little and often and a ‘heavy foot’/poor fuel consumption of the car.
Presumably if someone drives somewhere on a business trip they will still be able to claim mileage.
If people use a fuel card for personal mileage then they were/should-have paying tax on the benefit.
I don't know about anyone else buy the number of miles that I have driven in the last year is 1/4 of what I did the year before, much more staying at home - good for the planet!
>If people use a fuel card for personal mileage then they were/should-have paying tax on the benefit.
The implication is that this is not happening. Any use of a fuel card for personal purposes should result in a line-item on the P11d. Given the sums involved and the fact someone has gone to the press in indignation over something that should by all rights be cost-neutral, it implies that FJS corporate are looking the other way at the amounts being spent to allow the cards to be used to fluff the salaries of certain staff. Given fuel cards haven't been in common use since the 2000s, those are likely to be staff of the more tenured variety.
It's also worth noting that if they've got things set up correctly they could well be banking the mileage claim for use of a personal vehicle and the cost of the fuel from the fuel card; they're independent. So they'll be rinsing it both ways.
Frankly other FJS staff without this perk should be cheering this on - there's 200 staff hoovering up a million quid for their own benefit while the rest of the business is going down the drain. That ain't cricket.
You know what, Fujitsu ? By removing 80K employees you're also going to save a lot of money.
Oh, but you'll also be removing your means of making money. What a shame, eh ?
You want to make money ? You have to invest money. Salaries and bonuses are your investment to ensure that you continue to make money.
If I had to bet I'd say it's mostly engineers (and in previous years sales staff) who were travelling to customer sites. In the end it will mostly be just a credit shift, the employees will be effectively giving Fujitsu a short term interest free loan for the fuel until they claim the expenses. Most of those staff do regular expense claims already so I suspect they are quite likely to find that savings are nowhere near what was predicted.
short term interest free loan
It's not really interest-free if the card paid for fuel at 5% less than the pump price. The interest doesn't go to the employee I suppose, but the effect on the company is the same - pay more for the same thing.
Many companies seem to find this sort of thing much easier to deal with as a business-miles claim, with a flat rate paid per mile travelled which also compensates (at least in part) for wear-and-tear if the car is the employee's rather than the company's (I assume fuel cards are usually only available to company car drivers? Never having had one I don't know). Again, costs are greater to the company and there is potential for an employee to profit if they use a fuel-efficient car. For example, the company I work for pays between 25p and 45p per mile (varies by journey length) but my car does at least 11 miles per litre. At 25p I would - if I did any business mileage - be paid £2.75 for each litre of fuel my car uses. and at the moment even the Esso garage down the road is only charging £1.24 with the supermarkets being slightly cheaper.
Whilst it's only a few affected, it's for many a perk that was offered in leiu of pay rises.
Other companies bought them back either for a pay rise or a one-off payment.
Yes this only affects 200.
However many more have more than the standard holiday. This can also be "recovered by fire and re-hire"
Many more have better than std redundancy clauses..This can also be "recovered by fire and re-hire"
Many more have more than the average for their team salary, in some cases, because they worked damn hard to earn them, in other cases due to luck in the tupe raffle, and some because the pay gender gap.
This can also be "recovered by fire and re-hire"
Plus if Fujitsu can do it successfully, you bet every other tech company will go, ooh, that's interesting.
Plus 200 people who've worked hard having their pay cut, still ok with that?
Having been either a customer (in the public sector) of theirs or working with a private sector organisation that had partnered with them, the only observation I would make is that in the last 10-15 years their staff have been badly treated. Many of the good engineers have left, and the replacements, either contract or perm staffers are paid way below equivalent representative companies in their industries, this leads to a less then perfect service, and no fault of theirs as they have got a job (and good luck to anyone with one in currant times!) but had no training.
How they continue to win business is not rocket science, they undercut everyone and for us who have to use the systems they manage, its painful.
We have even taken to not raising calls as the fear of getting a specific couple of their engineers being sent to fix something is a horrific experience and we'd rather do without, or wait for their good break-fix engineer has visited site and raise the ticket when they're here, highlighting they have a man on site.
Whilst it's affecting just 200 staff, I rely on some of them with fuel cards, and so what's next? Maybe they can take away the training they don't give or offer their staff?
Speaking as one of the many departed, I’m amazed they have any in-house engineers left. Last I heard was that swathes of them were being outsourced.
Regarding fuel cards: this article seems to be referring to cards issued as a perk, not cards issued as a response to business needs (I.e. customer service engineering).
I’m a Fujitsu company car driver and I’d far rather not have the fuel card. It doesn’t work at pay at pump at all my closest petrol stations so I’ve avoided using it because I don’t want to have to go in and pay at the till. It’s just as much hassle to fill in the monthly girl claims as it would be to claim mileage on expenses. The sooner it goes the better for me.
So why do only circa 200 out of 9000 people have a fuel card?
A company I worked for, did away with fuel cards for 'staff' back in the early 1990's except for senior managers and company vans. Given the SM's effectively had two cars (privilege of their position), many of those fuel cards were actually being used by their spouse...
I had a fuel card when I was at Fujitsu, card holders are able to pay for all private fuel use with the card but that is declared as income and taxed accordingly.
This is effectively a salary cut of however much the individual employee spends on personal fuel each year. A one-off payment will not cover that but it would be simple for Fujitsu to average up the last 3 years of personal fuel usage and add that as a salary increase. Given that most people have been driving a fraction of their usual private mileage over the last 12 months, Fujitsu would do reasonably well out of that approach and staff would not lose out on the benefit completely.
The fire and re-hire threat is classic Fujitsu, they have always favoured confrontation over collaboration.
How many of the 200 chose to work at Fujitsu because of the fuel card benefit? Probably not many.
Could the money be used for better perks that would attract or benefit more employees? Absolutely.
Will Fujitsu use the cost savings for better perks? Or increased pay? Or better products? Yeah, right.
Large companies are skilled at this (seen it done many times).
Make redundancies. Shuffle team's, rebrand. Rehire in a "different time". Manager before? They now hire a Motivational Working Group Liason Officer. Desktop support? Now a Digital User Customer Support Team Member.
Oh and just stick AI or Cloud in the job description if to close to the old role.
My company offered car allowance and fuel card for consultants and field type people up until about 2 years ago, use the fuel card, don't make any expense claims. The fuel card is gone for new hires, but they still get a car allowance. They offered an opt-out for those with cards and some extra money to spend on benefits.
Both systems are a bit of a faf for reclaiming mileage from HMRC.
To be fair, the fuel cards encourage a lot of cars with poor fuel economy (Given you're basically just paying tax on the fuel) and discourages electric. I think getting rid of them is actually fairly responsible from an environmental point of view, assuming you give people plenty of notice of your intention so they think about mpg next time they buy a car and buy out the benefit rather than threaten fire and rehire!
I keep getting approached to go and work at Fujitsu by luckless headhunters who have never yet talked to me. Long term IT greybeards will remember the Fujitsu hard drive scandal from the early noughties and that still colours my judgement of this company - and they still are doing mean things it seems...
Same, I had at least 2 emails and a few calls everyday from several recruiters looking to fulfil roles with them, all massively below market rate (one being £262 per day for Day/Night 12hr shifts in central London inside IR35).
But for me it was the Horizon Post Office scandal, because that's what it was, no mistake, a scandal. Having FJ staff stand up in court as witnesses and lie (See https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/11/post_office_horizon_scandal_first_subpostmasters_cleared/ and https://www.postofficetrial.com/ and if you still want to work with them after that, you have no morals IMHO), possibly at the behest to the Post Office's legal team, although I can't confirm that part I'm sure that will come out in the (hopefully) criminal charges for perjury.
Seeing a heavily pregnant woman sent to prison knowing you lied, heck, any innocent person to prison because they made a computer, a device that is fundlementally designed to produce logic and accuracy, and they manage to produce a system they basically couldn't count and could be remoted into, and they knew it, and lied.
This makes me really, really angry....
Comments focussing on fuel cards etc. seem to be missing the point by a mile or so. How on earth is a an employer of Fujitsu's size so completely cack handed in negotiating a trivial change in a very few existing staff's remuneration package that a) it gets down to threatening people with almost certainly unlawful 'fire and rehire' and b) blows the issue up to where it is picked up by media? Sounds like the most effective way to save half a million a year would be to fire their HR department.
I'm glad that I didn't take up Fujitsu's Borg offer to join them in 2015 when they annexed the IT services at the place where I was working. It has been a constant round of disappointments for those who did TUPE into Fujitsu and the levels of anger expressed by those people is growing. It becomes counter productive fairly quickly. People I know who were always willing to help are now work-to-rule enthusiasts. They will just do the minimum to avoid getting fired and that's it. Also any change that could possibly be construed or misconstrued to affect Health and Safety results in the instant downing of tools. For example a new data centre was built and someone on a tour didn't see the emergency exit button, even though the tour guide showed it off. When they got back to the flock they told everyone that there was no emergency exit which resulted in every worker refusing to enter the DC, which means that none of them saw the button and the union got involved and... it all dragged on far longer than it needed to. People only do this stuff when they are unhappy.
People were enticed to accept the move with a lower salary but with more "benefits" such as a company car and fuel card. I'll have to go back and see what mood they are in now.
Typical FJ sniping at small groups of employees. I had one of these total waste of time spent 80% of my travel on their business anyway. Rumour has it their UK service contracts are just about bailing out their European business. Still dependant on old big cash cow contracts within public sector. In the UK. Glad I got out when I did and took my pension with me as that too is in dire straights
Typical Fujitsu picking off small groups so they don’t attract press and small groups are powerless. These benefit cards are probably management types not in the union. The way they behave I’d encourage all UK employees to join Unite. The recent volunteering is a sham and the offers are a joke. Pension funds will be ravaged and devalued again soon
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