170 Openreach Repayment Project Engineers to Go On Strike

The Communications Workers Union has announced that 170 of Openreach’s Repayment Project Engineers (RPE) are set to go on a 48 hour strike in two weeks’ time after the two sides failed to reach an agreement over the imposition of grading changes, which might affect areas like salaries, holidays and terms for newcomers.

Admittedly this is only a fairly small group, although it’s potentially somewhat of a test case for the CWU, which is preparing for the prospect of wider strikes in the future to combat various other changes within the BT Group (e.g. more changes to redundancy terms, related office closures and job losses etc.).

Last week the CWU announced that 86% of RPEs had voted to take industrial action on a 94% turnout, which meant that the “initial two days” of strike action could go ahead. The union said that the “first industrial action to be witnessed anywhere in BT Group since November 1999” will now take place on Wednesday 24th February and Thursday 25th February 2021.

The union added that they offered to work over the weekend to reach a negotiated solution, but Openreach only made itself available for talks on Tuesday – the final day of the window of opportunity before which the CWU had said it would make its next move. The CWU states that “no real progress” was made in those discussions and now we have the outcome.

Davie Bowman, CWU National Officer for Openreach, told members:

“The CWU set out very clearly the magnitude of the result, the strength of feeling among our members on the full range of issues we have discussed and sought a response to those issues. Unfortunately, in the view of the CWU National Team, significant progress was not made and the company merely wanted to ‘check again’ that the issues we were raising were fully understood and supported by you.

This morning the CWU were informed that that the senior management team are considering ‘roundtables’ to garner views from you the members. Of course, the company are entitled to discuss issues with their employees, but given a 94% turnout and 86% vote for strike action it seems clear to the NT that, as feared, the company is not willing to take your genuine concerns seriously.

You must ask yourself after all this time, the outstanding ballot result and the communication sent to you last Thursday, what the real purpose of this exercise may be? This can only be viewed as an attempt to delay any action the CWU is legally entitled to take.”

An Openreach spokesperson said:

“We’re surprised and saddened by the news, having worked closely with the Union for more than a year and a half to try and resolve this specific issue.

None of the 170 Repayments Project Engineers in question is at risk of losing their job or seeing any deterioration in their pay, terms and conditions. In fact we’ve offered them the option to upgrade to the better-paid, higher ‘Technical Professional’ grade, but we’ve also given a cast-iron guarantee that they can choose to stay on their existing terms and conditions – which includes an extremely competitive salary of around £45,000 a year. The new grade enables them to remain at this salary plus participate in an incremental bonus scheme.”

This is an area of the business where we’re growing and when we recently advertised roles at the new grade internally for promotion, we received hundreds of applications from other engineers.

At a time when many businesses are cutting jobs and have put staff on furlough, Openreach has been continuing to invest in our people and our network. We’ve hired 6,500 apprentices over the last two years and last month we announced the creation of more than 5,000 frontline engineering roles to help us build the UK’s future broadband infrastructure and make further service improvements.

We want to reassure customers that this action won’t impact the quality of the services we provide, or affect our large ongoing investments in recruitment, training and a new Full Fibre broadband network for the UK.”

In a letter that was immediately delivered to management, the CWU has stressed its “willingness to discuss these matters further with a view to reaching a negotiated settlement on this matter” – with the union adding that they were ready for talks “whenever [Openreach] wants them.”