poster342002 said:
The DWP has traditionally been strong, unionwise. But as I said earlier, it's no good continually focussing on the strongest link in the chain - it's the weakest that need urgent attention or the whole thing falls apart.
As far as I can tell, the government is not taking the slightest notice of these strikes and they're not laying people off in the conventional manner. Instead of mass reducndancies, there's a steady tightening of the sick and disciplinary penalties which themselves are enforced by PCS memebrs over others.
Not so sure if I agree with the above. I'm aware of several departments including my current and former, that are currently going through a second round of voluntary redundancies/voluntary early retirements.
As for tightening the screws on disciplinary issues, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. For disciplinary cases to be dragged on and on is not to the benefit of the individual - who has a long period of instability, not to the benefit of the team whose morale is dragged down, not beneficial to the department and not beneficial to the taxpayer.
I recently had one case that should have been an open-and-shut failed probabtion case on the grounds of failing to make the grade. Because the manager and team leader had not been through the agreed processes the whole case fgot dragged out over 9 months - I still don't know the outcome as I've since transferred. This was in the middle of a redundancy/restructuring programme and a lot of members were put on "priority mover" status as a result - though not this individual who was effectively given a permanent job because he needed to be given a "fair" chance to prove he could make the grade. The fact that he seemed to be bragging about the fact he wasn't a priority mover didn't go down too well either.
As a branch rep - and as someone who was forced into becoming a priority mover at the time, I felt that a lot of sand was kicked in my face over this and it really made me feel that:
1) The relationship between the unions and the employers needs to be re-looked at.
2) There needs to be a much stronger management culture within the public sector.
Given that recent civil service staff surveys have slammed the senior management culture and say that departments need to be much more robust about dealing with poor performance, I think that the unions need to learn that it is in the interests of their members to have a fair, efficient and robust performance management system.
Given that the Gershon review has torn into human resources departments across Whitehall, I don't think the civil service is in a position to start punitive disciplinary actions en masse in an effort to cut jobs. If anything it is far too time and resource-intensive. If anything there is an artificial head-count reduction through contracting functions out to the private sector, whether it's through consultants or tendering for corporate functions such as IT and computing. Those budgets come out of a different "pot" so don't count on the figures. It would be interesting to see the trend in levels of spending on some of these functions vis-a-vis spending on staff costs.
