Thousands of British Gas engineers have voted to reject revised contract terms and continue with strike action as an industrial dispute at Britain’s biggest energy supplier deepens.
The GMB union said that its members had walked out today for four days after voting overwhelmingly against the offer that had been negotiated at Acas, the dispute resolution service. It said the offer had been rejected because British Gas had refused to remove its threat to “fire and rehire” staff and that this remained the “main obstacle to a deal”.
Centrica, the FTSE 250 company that owns British Gas, said that it would now begin individual negotiations with staff having exhausted collective talks through the union.
The group, which reported adjusted operating profits of £447 million last year, operates a residential energy supply business with almost 7 million household customers and a home services business that is contracted to provide boiler repair and other maintenance to about 3.6 million households. It has been losing customers for a decade and Chris O’Shea, chief executive, is pushing through a restructuring plan to try to “arrest the decline”.
The bitter dispute with engineers began last year with plans to standardise contract terms, moving them to a 40-hour week from 37 hours at present, which the GMB said amounted to a 10 per cent pay cut.The row has increasingly come to focus, however, on Centrica’s decision to issue section 188 notices that warned employees that they could be fired and rehired on the lesser terms if they did not agree.
O’Shea said last week that he was hopeful that an agreement negotiated through Acas would be accepted but the GMB said today that more than three quarters of those who voted in the ballot had rejected the deal.
This latest four-day strike action will mean that engineers have now gone on strike for 30 days in total since the dispute began.
The revised deal at Acas is understood to have included some changes to the transition to the new terms but the GMB said that its failure was driven by the fire-and-rehire threat.
Justin Bowden, GMB national secretary, said: “British Gas’s fire-and-rehire plan is the main obstacle to members accepting a deal. They need to remove it now if we are to progress. GMB’s executive has determined action could continue to mid-April in this deadlocked dispute.”
He claimed: “More than 210,000 homes are in a backlog for repairs and 250, 000 planned annual service visits have been axed.” The figures are disputed by Centrica.
Centrica claimed that it had “done everything possible to end the current dispute with the GMB union” and said that it “must now progress with individual consultation for the remaining engineers who have not already agreed to the new terms”.
O’Shea said: “There is a job for everyone at the end of this difficult process, but we must change. Over 80 per cent of our workforce have agreed to the new terms and understand that our company needs to adapt to protect 20,000 UK jobs.
“Whilst we’ve reached collective agreements with the majority of our trade unions, we have been unable to secure an agreement with the GMB despite two extensive rounds of talks and making significant concessions. We’ll now talk directly to those colleagues who have not yet agreed their new contracts and we will go the extra mile to try and avoid the need to dismiss and re-engage.”