Hera Update

At long last the end is in sight - a reply from management basically agreeing to our proposals - The joint support staff unions are meeting together to dot the I's and cross the t's but basically all support staff will get a minimum payment of £500 and those on long service will have their leave increased to 30 days.

As a condition we have to agree to move our pay date to the last Thursday of the month as well as adopt a common incremental date and leave year.

The red circles are reducing daily - we reckon they are now around 20 - the last panel is tomorrow afternoon. There are around 200 people who are green circled - these people will get their pay, backdated to August 2006, in June subject to agreement


We have a branch meeting on Wednesday evening at 6.30 where this will be discussed and we will arrange a group meeting next Wednesday afternoon - 28th- to go through it in greater detail - we will then move to the balloting process. The agreement will be sent to our national officer for scrutiny and the ballot will be organised by our regional officer - Richard Munn.

Red Circles get smaller

Currently just before the final scoring panel the red circles have been reduced to

42

Merger Ballot Results

Merger ballot Results
As per expectations, the ballot for merger of the Amicus and T&G unions has resulted in a 'Yes' vote. The results in Amicus were

18.9% in favour
8.1% against
73% not voting

The unions look at it in a different way- 70.1% in favour and 29.9% against, on a 27% turn out). The T&G machine achieved a significantly better 'For' vote at 23.3% of ballot papers issued (86.4% of votes returned).

Other union mergers have attracted much higher majorities in favour, typically 80% or more of votes returned. Our last one, AEEU and MSF, was supported by 84% and 80% of each union respectively, on a 31% turnout. The Amicus result is surprisingly low, given the massive pro-merger campaign by both unions' publicity departments and a complete absence of any concerted campaign against the merger.

Given the decline in lay democracy, in Amicus at least, over the last 6 years perhaps the result should not be seen as surprising.