Posts by Ian 3 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2008
I hope you get a good YES vote in the ballot, and if you have to come out I hope IT staff everywhere will do collections for you. It would be great to send a message to employers that it isn't acceptable to dump us on the scrap-heap so they can cut costs - whether by moving the jobs within the UK or internationally.
This whole debate is a big red herring. The points-based system does not apply to "intra company tranfers", which is where a company brings an employee from one country to work in another. For IT jobs there is no meaningful control on this, and the numbers of work permits (under the old system) for IT workers have been high and rising.
In practice, this means the big corporations can use cheap labour to depress wages, while the government makes it hard for anyone not employed by such companies to travel here for work. Ordinary punters lose out whether from the UK or abroad.
The semiconductor industry has been around a long time, operated in different countries and to different standards in different workplaces.
Talking about PPE assumes that PPE protects effectively against the hazard, and at the moment nobody is claiming to understand what the hazard is/was. As an unconnected example, I remember being told to use an extractor because or rosin fumes from soldering, then finding out that the filter was for particles many times larger than the rosin particles.
I think the other problem is that companies and workers tend to base their protective measures on data sheets and regulations. The problem is that industries such as semiconductor manufacturing have changed their substances and processes faster than reliable data or regulation can keep up.
UNITE is right to call for research so that action can be based on evidence rather than guesswork. To those who think a report would just become wallpaper, that might be the wish of those in the industry who are currently resisting writing it, but would workers in the industry and their unions ignore it? I don't think so.
Ian.
www.iansunitesite.org.uk
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