COMMUNICATION WORKERS UNION

BT Openreach – Attendance Patterns

As reported to the CWU’s Openreach Briefing Committee on 29 July 2008, discussions have begun with Openreach on what the business sees as an imbalance between resource (at times of the day and weekends) and work arrival patterns.

These discussions do not, at this stage, vary the governance agreements we have in place for local negotiations.  Two meetings have been held so far and these have been confined to reaching a common understanding of the problems.

We have explored the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each Openreach product as well as discussing the Service Level Guarantees which Openreach must now pay for automatically.  It is clear that, in order to meet the SLAs, Openreach is very much dependent on relatively high levels of overtime and on call-out.  The CWU team in turn recognise that, in a period of falling volumes and consequently revenue, how the cost of this could impact on the numbers in the field workforce.

As Branch Officers who have been involved in local attendance arrangements will recognise, all too often the burden of providing business need coverage falls on a particular section of members time after time.

The CWU Executive team has approached these discussions with an open mind whilst simultaneously making it absolutely clear to management that any eventual agreement will need to have the consent of CWU members in Openreach either through the voluntarism concept or by a majority in a consultative ballot.

Branches will recognise, not least from local experience, that reconciling all of these conflicting factors will be challenging to say the least.  Additionally, the Executive team has made plain to Openreach that we will expect to see progress on other issues currently under discussion rather than any slippage of timescales.

Source: LTB635/08