This is a to inform you of the latest situation regarding your pay and a response to the Bulletin issued today by Thales stating that they are imposing this years pay deal despite no agreement being reached.
We have been in protracted talks over pay since the New Year. However, the reality is that there has been very few meetings on this matter and in my view the company have prevaricated long enough. We reached a final point about a month ago, when the company made an offer of 1.7% which following discussions with the reps, we rejected it. Despite this we also asked for further talks on other issues to see if we could negotiate a more acceptable package for our members. (see email section below sent to Thales HR)
I confirm that we reject the 1.7% however we are willing to discuss further around the entire package on offer.
To enable this we need some further Information please:
1. Details of the Management Team payrise believed to be 8%
2. Details of other payments within Thales.
We also wish to further discuss the below:
1. Full settlement of the ALP and backpay
2. Implementing the A-Z in RSS
3. Remuneration for Rosters in RSS
4. Training and loss of Night Rate
5. Payment for people doing the SPC role (as per Field Engineers)
6. Any hours left at the end of the year for annual leave rounded up to a full shift
7. An end to the Tracking of people (Veludu Connect)
8. Internal staff having priority for Training over Contract Labour)
9. Full details of the alleged debt issue in DTS
10. Retention and recognition of overtime rate for night staff to include night rate enhancement across our bargaining unit
Thales have not fully replied, but did state they could not come back to us on some issues until the end of May. Whilst this is not ideal as we have a meeting arranged for the 24th, then it was acceptable to wait. However, we now find that Thales have imposed the pay rise on our members arguing they did not want to ‘delay’ this benefit to its staff. This clearly is not in the spirit of them asking to delay a response to the end of May and then saying that they are hugely concerned about the delay.
The RMT have only one reply to what can only be seen as a breakdown in Industrial Relations and that is to tell the company that we are in dispute. Our reps are looking at the membership list and we will be preparing a ballot matrix as per legal requirements so that if there is no positive outcome in the talks next week, then we will be asking the RMT National Executive to ballot our members for Strike action and Action short of Strike.