In responding to that, I will pick up on your earlier question, too. There are two ways to do a redundancy consultation. You can give the trade unions and the staff a detailed set of plans and say, “That’s it. We’re ready to consult on it now.” In that scenario, most of the staff and the trade unions would say, “That’s great—you’ve presented us with a fait accompli, so where do we go from here?”
Alternatively, the STV management can come to us and say, “Here’s what it kind of feels like, but we want to talk to you about it.” Also, rather than calling an all-staff meeting at which to say who was at risk of redundancy, the company can elect to have one-to-one meetings and to tell individuals that their post is potentially at risk. It can explain that that approach is based on previous experience in which a number of staff who had been affected by similar proposals had said that they did not want to sit in an all-staff meeting and hear that their job was at risk, and that that should be done one to one.
My faith is placed in the trade union and management process. There are different ways for management to present its proposals to staff. It is easy to sit back, nit-pick and be negative. I prefer management to come to us with flexibility and say, “Here’s what it feels like. What do you think?” We are talking about people’s jobs, so I want to be able to believe that I can, in a consultation process, make alternative suggestions to management, which might then go down that route and not make the person redundant.
Such times are stressful for anyone who is affected, and members would prefer that we can come back to them and say that we know that they had been targeted for redundancy but we have managed to sort something out. I prefer that to management showing no flexibility, because that opens management up to the criticism that it does not know what it is doing.
It depends which side of the fence you are on. Ross Greer described two scenarios. I suspect that the truth is somewhere in the middle and that the management made mistakes: it did not get it right and everybody was told about it. An area on which I consider it fell down was in not giving people written detail. People were told in individual meetings what management suspected would happen and staff were given briefings and shown nice PowerPoint presentations, but there were never any bits of paper on which people could hang their hats and say, “Right. It’s five of these and it is one of this and it’s six of those.” Our members were coming to us and saying, “Well, I was told it was three”, and somebody else was saying, “No—he said four.” The feedback—in the absence of bits of paper—was contradictory.
The bulk of the redundancies are faced by BECTU members and nobody is out of the woods yet. As I said in my opening statement, people who turn round and say that they are not taking on new skills put themselves in the firing line. My point is that there has been a lack of investment in training and skills development for staff. I do not consider that there is any need for compulsory redundancies—that is the point that BECTU is making to STV. We have negotiated changes to its proposals, reduced the number of people who will be affected and found alternative work for a number of those who are affected. Those are all positive aspects, but STV needs to do more to meet us in the middle so that we can avoid compulsory redundancies.