Resetting the Openreach resourcing agenda

Telecoms & Financial Services, Openreach May 25 2018

Talks are to be opened with Openreach in a bid to reaffirm the key principles contained in the existing ‘High Level Principles’ collective agreement on resourcing and to ‘reset’ them to deal with a fast-changing industrial environment.

The principles the CWU is seeking to reinforce and adapt to present-day realities include:

  • Direct labour remaining Openreach’s labour of first choice
  • Release schemes not being used to as a means to replace direct labour by external resource
  • The overall level of UK team member resource not being reduced as a consequence of offshoring
  • Higher graded work being carried out by UK direct labour
  • Globally sourced work being returned to the UK to provide a solution to direct labour resource surpluses
  • When the company believes a requirement exists to use non-permanent labour, that there will be meaningful consultation with the CWU to agree the way forward.

Delegates at CWU Annual Conference unanimously ratified the approach, which will see discussions commence with the company  immediately, and a comprehensive report-back to branches by September.

Proposing the motion on behalf of the T&FS Executive, assistant secretary Davie Bowman explained: “The current agreements have served us well and contain the underpinning principles to take us forward. We do, however, need to use those principles in a far different environment from where those words were written and agreed.

“Pressure from Government, the regulator, communications providers and end customers has raised the speed and scale of change that Openreach is seeking to address.

“In addition, major programmes such as Broadband Delivery UK, the Superfast Extension Programme and now Fibre Cities will see the high use of third party labour on major civils and build activities.

“The use of Kelly’s and Quinn’s on provision work began as backfill to create the headroom for new employees to be recruited and trained – but they have become an almost permanent fixture within the Service Delivery field environment,” Davie continued.

“Those numbers are unlikely to fall, even against the background of over 2,200 new recruits being brought into that environment by Openreach this year.”

Davie added the challenge in the desk-based environment is even more apparent, stressing that the “re-use of third party labour both on and offshore is now at unacceptable levels.”

Speaker after speaker in the debate agreed that the need to reaffirm the core tenets of the ‘High Level Principles’ agreement is now pressing – especially in the desk-based environment.

Pointing out that recent pension changes mean more people are going to have to work for longer, Dave Kauffman of South East Central branch predicted there will soon be many more employees in their mid-to-late 60s who “aren’t necessarily going to be climbing poles anymore.”

He added: “We need to be looking now to support those people in 10, 15 and 20 years time, ensuring there are other streams of work for them to do so they aren’t just kicked out by an employer that’s saying that they ‘don’t fit the criteria’ anymore.”

Anne Nicholson of Meridian branch agreed: “We can’t just concentrate on increasing field staff numbers,” she insisted.

“If we don’t have desk-based jobs we don’t have anywhere for people to move into. Where those desk-based jobs are can be discussed at a different time – but we need to make sure they are there for people who will need them in the future.”