Collective Grievances About Unpaid Weekend And Shift Allowances

Most of this afternoon I have been working on getting ready for a collective grievance on behalf of senior staff working in adult residential homes who have not been paid weekend and shift allowances since 2008.

In 2008, the city council's new Single Status contract included additional allowances for all staff who work weekends and alternating shift systems. But some groups of staff have never received these enhancements. Managers, assistant managers, team leaders and other staff in the older adults residential homes are a case in point. They have routinely worked shifts starting at 7.00 in the morning and ending at 10.00 at night, seven days a week. They are owed thousands of pounds because the council has refused to pay the contracted allowances.

A group of over 20 of these staff have been pursuing a collective grievance, with representation from UNISON, for the last couple of years. We've got as far as having our grievance upheld at Stage 2 but the council is still refusing to pay. They say because of the current economic climate "the department is not in a position to pay you the outstanding monies owed". I have tried making the same argument to British Gas about my energy bills but to no effect !

So now we are preparing a Statement of Case for Stage 3 of the grievance procedure, a hearing in front of three councillors. This will be fascinating to see what they make of the situation. We do believe that the council is preparing to make an offer of settlement to the different groups of staff who are owed money for these unpaid allowances. But it may take some time for this to be put into effect.

In the meantime, the city council have imposed another new contract which removes these allowances as from 1 November 2011. That means that staff have three months minus a day in which to lodge an employment tribunal case for breach of the 2008 contract. We are preparing to lodge these legal cases for the members concerned. But we need a completed Case Referral Form for all the affected members individually. We have a rapidly growing pile of these completed forms and we are encouraging anyone else who believes they are due unpaid allowances to send us a form.

So today I have been writing the Statement of Case, sifting through evidence we need to submit with it, answering emails from the members, sending out a bulk email to all the members in the collective grievance about what we are doing, sorting through the referral forms to see they have all the information we need and contacting individuals to fill out the gaps.

We are doing the same thing for other groups of staff in the same circumstances. One huge group is the workers in Childrens Homes. We believe hundreds of them are owed allowances dating back to March 2008. There's an even bigger collective grievance for them that my Assistant Branch Secretary is working on.



Graeme Horn
Joint Branch Secretary