ONS staff to vote again on dispute over working from home
Union members at the Office for National Statistics are being reballoted on whether to continue taking industrial action in a long-running dispute over working from home.
More than 1,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) have been refusing to follow an instruction to come into the office two days a week since May.
The 1,179 workers based in Newport, Titchfield in Hampshire, London, Darlington, Manchester and Edinburgh, recently refused to work overtime.
With their six-month strike mandate running out next month, the union is balloting members for a new mandate to allow their action to continue.
PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said: “Management’s mandatory workplace attendance regime does nothing to improve productivity but everything to disrupt the lives of ONS staff, who were led to believe they could continue to work from home indefinitely.
“Our ongoing action has allowed our members to continue those flexible arrangements without damaging the organisation’s outputs.
“The employer’s continuing refusal to talk to us, however, means we need to ballot members again to increase the pressure for a sensible, negotiated outcome.”
The ballot ends on October 1.
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Frankly I have no support for them, refusing to come in to the office for two days a week!
Is it convenience working from home, or has it now turned into laziness?
No wonder when you call any organisation in the UK, you are on hold for ages.
“Amazon is ordering staff back to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid work policy.”
“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid,” he said, adding that it would help staff be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other”.
Maybe the ONS Unions need to get real?
What are the chances of them winning/ sorry “statistics”, they should know.