Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
5/23/2014
GMB Union May Take Action Against Sellafield after Worker Upgrading
The union GMB is considering taking action against Sellafield Limited after 400 health physics were upgraded to management, which took them out of GMB’s collective bargaining agreements. “The company has now decided that our members should be upgraded, but they are saying that as part of that they are managers and therefore our unions is no longer recognized by them,” GMB National Secretary Gary Smith told WC Monitor this week. “We think it’s part of an agenda because we know at some point they are going to cut the management numbers.” GMB is now considering whether to file an industrial dispute, which could result in union members taking action with a strike or work to rule.
Sellafield Limited and parent body organization Nuclear Management Partners conducted a review of employee grading at the request of employees and union representatives, which resulted in the upgrading of some workers. Management employees are represented by a different union under collective bargaining agreements. “We value the important role played by our unions, and we have no plans to review the recognition of any unions,” Sellafield Ltd. spokeswoman Ruth Hutchison said in a statement.
But GMB, which was highly critical of NMP management during the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s recent review of the Sellafield contract, sees the upgrading of their workers as retaliation. “If we have got to have a dispute about it we are going to have a dispute about it. We have won the moral argument, we have won the justification of the regrading,” Smith said. “The problem for the company is that the cat is out of the bag. They’ve accepted the fact that our members are being underpaid. But we are not going to allow them to derecognize us. They are trying to punish GMB for standing up to them and criticizing.” He believes the move “a perfect cover for NMP to say to that they are losing the cheaper management grade that they’ll be able to depend on as the decommissioning work increases and as they cut the proper management grades.”
