Pushing for "our work, our way"

As June ends, members of the PCS union in the Ministry of Housing (MHCLG) are nine weeks into their campaign of action short of strike (ASOS) in support of their long running Our Work, Our Way dispute. Under the ASOS, they refuse "attendance requirements" and work from home or in office as they wish.

In its origin, the PCS MHCLG campaign brought together three broad issues:

• The closure of six MHCLG offices in Birmingham, Exeter, Newcastle, Sheffield, Truro, and Warrington, with staff told to choose between “voluntary” redundancy, 100% home working or long and more expensive journeys to new offices.

• Location and recruitment issues focussed on management’s proposals to remove the right of staff to apply for any post with MHCLG and, if successful, to retain their existing home office, and to effectively run down certain offices (additional to the office closures) by restricting external recruitment to favoured offices.

• Management’s imposition of individual office attendance requirements on staff allocated to the remaining offices - 50% of contracted hours attendance in most offices, 40% in the others, with a declared intention of moving to 60%, with the variations in requirement and the future plan reflecting insufficient office space

Despite substantial strike and other action last year, management has now closed all the offices with the exception of Birmingham and Warrington, which they are still intent on closing. Management has also hitherto resisted PCS’s demand for (inevitably reduced) office facilities in the affected areas to enable members to work at an office from time to time with colleagues if they so wish, especially those members for whom 100% home working is unsuitable for health, housing, and domestic reasons.

Last year management made a ludicrously qualified offer on this issue, effectively dressing up a refusal as an offer. Yet movement on the local office space issue would be an easy concession for management and would make them look less like hypocrites for insisting on office attendance requirements while telling the victims of their closure programme to work at home irrespective of their personal circumstances.

Similarly, management could easily shift on location and recruitment. For a considerable period MHCLG ran with a “location neutral” policy that allowed staff to apply for posts anywhere in the Department while retaining their current work location. The policy increased career opportunities, especially for staff in smaller offices, without impacting outputs and contributed to the Government’s claimed desire to increase opportunities in the regions.

Running down some of the remaining offices by not externally recruiting to them, while simultaneously telling staff that they must be willing to attend distant offices to obtain many of the vacancies or promotions on offer, is a recipe for further closures, more redundancies, frozen “careers”, and loss of morale.

None of this is consistent with the Government’s argument that “Growing the Civil Service presence throughout the country brings rewarding cross-government career opportunities and supports local economic growth, fostering geographical balance and making the Civil Service even more diverse, representative and effective.”

Indeed, while the Government is particularly keen to develop 13 cross-government locations, MHCLG has closed one of its offices in those areas, Newcastle, and plans to close another, Birmingham, in favour of Wolverhampton, a location that is not among the 13 named places and demonstrating the flexibility that MHCLG has under government policy and therefore its ability to reach agreement with PCS if it wishes to show goodwill to staff. Perhaps MHCLG representatives should ask Mr Burnham to intervene!

Earlier in June, MHCLG representatives reported to members that management wanted to discuss some issues relevant to the dispute. In any talks representatives should be very clear that they now need to see substantial movement on location and recruitment issues and upon office spaces in areas where offices have closed

Movement in these areas alone, if it comes, would not be sufficient for resolving the dispute without substantial movement on office attendance. The compulsory office attendance mandates are not operationally necessary, given the nature of MHCLG work; cannot address other questions, such as the integration of new staff; and have obvious equality implications.

For example, a long-term policy of employee choice flexibility will enable carers to work full time or to contract more hours on a part time working pattern because commuting time may be converted to contracted working. This would be a boon to pay, pensions and long-term security, especially for women and colleagues with health issues, and relieve the pressures of rushing to and from the office to meet dependant care needs. Insisting on attendance mandates is tantamount to insisting on some members working reduced hours.

Movement on both sides on this critical issue may be possible, but not on the basis of requiring staff to attend an office for a specific period of time subject to conduct dismissal procedures.

At the outset of the renewed action the MHCLG PCS Branch Executive Committee (BEC) advised members to only attend the office for as much or as little time as suits them and, additionally for members who are line managers, to refuse to enforce office attendance requirements, explaining that staff legally undertaking ASOS should not be deemed to be acting unreasonably.

This is the correct approach, as opposed to seeking to persuade all members to a policy of total non-compliance. The MHCLG BEC knows that some members prefer or need to be in the office more than others, reflecting differences in home accommodation, ease of journey to work, dependant care, health, disability as defined under the Equality Act 2010, caring responsibilities, and other work/life balance considerations.

PCS is as obliged to defend the right of these members to attend good quality office accommodation - with appropriate H&S measures in place, and, where appropriate, reasonable adjustments - as it is the rights of those members who need or prefer to work from home. But even then, MHCLG BEC must and does insist on the right of members attending offices to decide how long they will be in the office, making time up at home on the same day or later if need be.

The Our Work Our Way campaign rightly focusses on staff controlling their working lives, being trusted to make decisions about how and where they work from on the basis of their circumstances, preferences, and understanding of their jobs.

This approach would not prevent management from genuinely encouraging – as opposed to pressurising – people to attend the office, it would enable the management to establish corporate targets (as opposed to individual focussed targets underpinned by misconduct procedures), and it would be consistent with the technological, organisational, and economic direction of travel and the positive experience of hybrid working in recent years.

The MHCLG BEC has a solid, renewed, legal strike mandate for its campaign and for stepping up the action. Members who do not wish to meet an office attendance requirement are standing firm on the ASOS mandate. The BEC has been exploring the possibilities for strikes. §