back to article Fresh strike action ballot planned at Fujitsu over pay, pensions, job cuts

Unionised workers at Fujitsu will again be tested on their appetite for fresh strike action over proposed jobs, silencing of company reps in the Works Council, pay and pensions, says Unite. The Japanese organisation confirmed in October last year that it planned to chop 1,800 employees to beef up UK margins that were " …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Strike action never works

    And Ignite should know that. But there's other strategies for the modern day that they (or more likely the TUC) could adopt. How about either a league table of all large employers based on how they pay, and how they treat their staff, their employee relations, and their conduct during any disputes? Obviously Fujitsu would be jostling with DXC for the title of Britain's Shittest Tech Employer (or would they?). And that would be helpful to prospective applicants, it'd make recruitment more difficult, as well as highlighting to these companies' customers that they are dealing with a disreputable outfit.

    The TUC would need an insight and data team to correlate all this, and make sure that the labelling has good evidential backup (to avoid having their arse sued off), but that team could also evaluate data on management salaries, director payments, company profitability, so that they can differentiate between the companies who HAVE to cut costs, and those who simply want to gouge more profit by crapping on employees, and fling that into the mix.

    If the worst employers had a label, widely reported in the press (who'd love this) of "Rubbish employer: Avoid applying to this company", that would help put a whole lot more pressure on management than strikes, for the simple reason that strikes lower the payroll costs at companies who clearly don't care about their service anyway. And the recruitment impact goes beyond the unionised staff - as a manager, would you want your career stained by working somewhere like DXC, if they had the BSTE accolade. The press would love it.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Please can "BSTE" awards become a reality

    BSTE what a brilliant idea :)

    It brightened up yet another miserable afternoon in one of the front runners for such an award (DXC)

  3. h3nb45h3r

    Let's be fair, if the majority of FJ staff I know were to go on strike, productivity will not go down.

    They have some great engineers working for them, however they have a larger number of people who are in positions because they have a pulse and are willing to turn up and accept not much money for the job they are doing.

    This then compounds the problem, low paid and untrained or inexperienced staff cannot provide the service their customer deserves, but then again, FJ have just been massively under cutting the likes of Crapita, DXC etc. to win contracts, hence the lack of staff, and more importantly, the lack of staff competent in the disciplines they find themselves in.

    As for contractors, they have employed (due to a lack of permie staff) a lot of contractors who have never touched the technologies they are supposed to be looking after, and in the field I work in (and have to deal with them) it's embarrassing when you ask a simple question and they don't understand basic and simple terminology

    As an example, I working networking and several of their contracted 'network engineers' didn't know what a subnet was., and to compound the issue, they are being paid about half of what I would consider the going day rate. This gives genuine, skilled and talented contractors a very bad reputation.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    13% pay rise to £1.65m, nice for some some living the hog life, off the back of hard working employees.

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