Adolfo Fernández fails - Capita VMO2 & Tesco Mobile contract members dispute23 Feb 2024 23:06
23rd February 2024
[Mass grievances lodged by Capita VMO2 and Tesco Mobile contract members as disputed 2023 pay deal goes to ACAS]
An increasingly bitter row with Capita over glaring irregularities in the application of the 2023 pay deal for VMO2 and Tesco Mobile contract members is now being escalated to ACAS in a last ditch attempt to prevent the disagreement spiralling into a full-blown dispute.
This week’s (Wednesday’s) agreement between company and union negotiators to refer the issue to the independent arbitration and conciliation service comes in the wake of a remarkable outpouring of employee anger that has so far seen at least 50 individual and collective grievances lodged by members – plus an as yet unknown number of small claims court claims.
The involvement of ACAS – which Capita could theoretically have vetoed – follows the company’s steadfast refusal to date to reconsider the way in which two key strands of the 2023 pay deal were applied in practice, and the CWU’s equally vehement insistence that fundamental issues of trust are at stake on both issues that simply cannot be overlooked:
One involves a carbon copy re-run of the miscalculation of the 2022 pay deal for longer-serving (TUPE population) staff on 36-hour contracts which was finally corrected in March last year. At that stage the company conceded that calculating the pay increase using a formula based on now standard 37.5-hour Capita FTE contract wrongly disadvantaged those on shorter hours. Crucially, in a detailed joint statement with the union that was shared with the workforce at that time, Capita pledged that it would make changes to its systems “to prevent this happening again”.
The second issue involves the company’s failure to inform the union or members that the belated 2023 pay deal was inclusive of, rather than additional to, last year’s Real Living Wage (RLW) uplift that had been automatically applied to 249 of the lowest paid workers on the VMO2 and Tesco Mobile contracts’ in April last year. As such, when individuals came to open their November pay packets, they were horrified to discover that, with the RLW increase deducted, their actual rises bore scant relation to the deal they had overwhelmingly accepted in good faith just a month earlier. That issue was immediately flagged up to management by the CWU, but following a company response just before Christmas – where the company failed to satisfactorily explain its position of not applying what had been agreed – national officer Tracey Fussey was unequivocal as to where the blame lay in a blistering response to Capita’s chief operating officer last month.
“We put the wording of the agreement to our members – the words were provided by yourselves,” Tracey pointed out. Our members participated in a ballot and voted on the agreed deal put before them. It appears that you have inexplicably reneged on the deal. Furthermore, you directly communicated the sam
Sign In
Follow the stocks
