Immediately after the IT meltdown began, following pressure from TBU, TSB put in place special overtime arrangements to recognise the fact that all staff were going beyond the call of duty in dealing with customers following the biggest IT meltdown in UK corporate history. During that period the Bank received some 136,913 complaints and many of those have still not been dealt with satisfactorily, or at all. And complaints are still coming in all the time. Many customers whose complaints are still outstanding are going into branches to find out what’s going on and that’s creating extra work.
For TSB to reduce overtime payments for this key group of staff now is completely unacceptable and counter productive. Grade D and E staff, like all their colleagues across the Bank, have shed blood, sweat and many tears for TSB over the last few months and to kick them in the teeth now is vindictive.
Mr. Meddings, who is now responsible for running TSB, should focus on the key issues at hand. The very idea that the IT system is nearly fixed is fanciful. There are still daily outages in many branches, call centres and processing centres, chip and pin machines are constantly crashing or refusing to work at all, TCR machines are not working, the voucher readers still don’t read the digits on the bottom of bills and cheques so staff are constantly having to type in this information causing extra work and customer delays. We could go on. Nearly 6 months into this disaster and staff are still working regular overtime to clear the backlog of work, and ensure that customers experience the best service possible. To tell grade D and E staff they can’t claim overtime now, when all of the work being done by staff is directly, or indirectly, related to the IT meltdown is stupid. The Bank is simply trying to save money by exploiting the goodwill of grade D & E members of staff. That is unacceptable.
Accord & Unite Sell Out Staff … Again
We expected that the Bank would try and change the overtime arrangements at some stage to save money but what we didn’t expect is that Accord and Unite would roll over and agree to staff being exploited in such a blatant way.
The Bank says: “In our conversations both Unite and Accord…challenged us to make sure Partners are properly rewarded for extra hours they are working”. Grade D and E staff will still be expected to work the extra hours until the new IT system is working properly but they are not going to be properly rewarded under the agreement reached by Accord and Unite. The price of being an approved Union seems to be you accept what’s being offered with no questions asked. That’s a price no properly independent Union would ever accept.