Despite huge budget reductions leading to a third of posts are being cut, Camden UNISON achieved significant concessions, including the majority of staff not having to re-interview for posts, and no members who appealed against redundancy were made compulsorily redundant.
Originally nearly all of the around 170 staff in scope were to be reinterviewed for their posts. However, a large number of applications for voluntary redundancy on the scale 6 level meant that these were avoided for this group of staff.
UNISON members, helped by reps, put together a detailed collective response to management proposals. Extended discussions then took place between reps and continue management and HR, and resulted in additional groups of workers not having to be re-interviewed for posts, including PAs and information assistants.
In addition, a large number of members who were on scale 4 were successfully appointed to more senior scale 6 roles.
There were a significant number of redundancies, primarily amongst middle managers from PO1-PO4, including some compulsory redundancies. However no union members who wished to appeal against redundancy were dismissed, and no members were redeployed to lower graded posts without pay protection.
UNISON was in a weak position through the restructure due to the relatively low level of union membership amongst the in-scope staff (only around 33%), but despite this members sticking together managed to achieve some significant concessions.
We continue to have concerns about high workloads for the remaining staff, both in the business admin service and outside in areas where work has been pushed to.