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Flexible workforce solutions gather further pace

Thompson airways pilots have voted to accept a pay cut, Jaguar Land Rover staff have agreed to a four day week and 85% of KPMG’s employees have voted to accept changes to their terms and conditions – all as an alternative to compulsory redundancies.

As forecast last year and reported last month (see People Matters, Surviving the downturn, November 2008 and Creative approaches help to limit damage, March 2009) businesses are increasingly keen to retain staff through difficult times by examining all options before redundancy programmes but its not all friendly employment relations out there.

Engineering firm Renshaw managed to win the crass employer award this month by issuing all staff, including those not amongst the 470 compulsory redundancies they were about to implement, with a 24 point e-mail urging them to reduce the personal belongings that they held at work, presumably so that the company could usher them off the premises more easily. Meanwhile, car parts firm Visteon saw staff occupy plants in Belfast, Basildon and Enfield over a dispute about the value of redundancy settlements and BBC journalists have voted in favour of industrial action including two one-day stoppages in April in a row over compulsory redundancies.

For those fed up with gloomy economic news, perhaps the absence of Robert Peston from our screens for a couple of days will be a blessed release.