Strike averted 11th hour

The strike was set down for tomorrow. Today union members voted to accept the company's new offer. It was almost a unanimous vote yes. The union organiser gave his view that we'd be very unlikely to get an offer better than this one. We agreed. There will be a period in which all parties have the legal time to look at the agreement (management and workers) and then the signing off of it legally.

This is the first agreement negotiated with the new management supplied by the new Empire owners of the company. They just had not the faintest idea about our resolve, and from the start thought they could simply walk all over us. By doing so they caused union membership to increase on the site by over 40%, as workers there saw the attitude of the new management.

For example, we've had in place, negotiated over many years, a redundancy agreement that was up to about 48 weeks max depending on years of service. They wanted to walk in and slash that right back to just 16 weeks max. The pay offer at the start was only 2%, not 4%. They wanted to link the pay increase to individual tests of capability (remember we're talking here about an increase pretty much in line with inflation only). And it went on, simply an attack on our current conditions. Three months after we were due a pay rise as the agreement ran out in Jan, on top of that attack they hadn't even offered any pay rise yet in the negotiations. I mean seriously, did they really expect that we'd just let them walk all over us?

I many ways it's been disappointing to us that the new management are such a lot of bumbling fools. That they so underestimated our resolve. That they nearly presented the shareholders and clients with a one day strike. That it took the threat of a strike to finally get them to listen to us. Fuckin unbelievable.