18.04.2013

Lee Rock interview: Fight against victimisation

Lee Rock, a principled grassroots rep in the Public and Commercial Services union, was dismissed for ‘unsatisfactory attendance’ in February. PCS believes he was sacked primarily because of his union role at the Sheffield contact centre. He spoke to Tina Becker about his campaign for reinstatement

 How is your campaign going?

It’s going well. The union group executive in the department for work and pensions (DWP) supported my case and forwarded it to the national disputes committee, which then approved the ballot and recommended members to vote for strike action. So we have been balloting in the local contact centre for the last 10 days and we will know next Monday evening if a majority of members supports a strike.

We have been leafleting every morning and the feedback has been very positive, but there is always a concern with postal ballots that the turnout is very low. In national elections, only around 9% of members vote. I would be disappointed with a turnout of less than 33%, but it can happen. My appeal will be heard on Tuesday, so we will have the result then, which might add a bit of pressure to the decision-making process.

What are your chances of being reinstated?

If we don’t win the ballot, then there is absolutely no chance of me being reinstated. If we win, then it certainly would focus management’s mind. It all depends on how much punishment the department is prepared to take just to get rid of one person. But things are getting much, much tougher. There have been some quite vicious attacks on the workforce and the union. We will be very hard hit by the cutting of facility time for trade union reps, which comes into force on June 1. As I am continuing to represent PCS members, I have been able to see that that things really are getting tougher. We used to win six out of 10 cases: we are now winning three. The employer has become much more aggressive.

How is management reacting to your campaign?

Again, they are very aggressive. I have been banned from the premises, so when I am representing members, we have to go to one of their head office buildings, and management have chosen one which is on the other side of Sheffield city centre. So, the member, the manager and the note-taker all have to catch a bus to get there and have been given half an hour travel time each way. I have also been banned from every job centre in South Yorkshire - including ones that are not even in the Sheffield area. No reason has been given for this and they recognise that I continue to represent people and continue in my role as assistant branch secretary.

We have been dishing out stickers that demand, “Reinstate Lee Rock”, but management has insisted that they must be removed from members’ computers and personal work spaces. Our members put them up, then management goes round peeling them off at night and the next day our members put them up again. They have also banned our reps from sending out emails from their work addresses that make any reference to my case. We believe that’s in breach of management’s own guidelines. This has been raised nationally by the union, but so far it has not been resolved.

Is it unusual for a PCS branch to go on strike to reinstate an individual member?

Trade union reps of course continue to be sacked on spurious grounds, but the problem has been that the local branches unfortunately didn’t feel they could guarantee strike action. The last strike must have been about eight years ago, when there was action over disciplinary measures taken against the branch secretary of the PCS East London. That was successful at the time and the threat of his dismissal was removed. As the London regional organiser at the time I was very involved in that campaign.

I think we have been able to explain to members in Sheffield that this case is about the victimisation of an experienced trade union rep and that the whole union is the target here. It’s not about my sickness case. Management have actually misapplied their own rules in order to get me. This has been made very obvious by the fact that the referral for my dismissal contains a reference to my trade union activity, which has nothing to do with the absence issue. The only reason the reference is there is to emphasise to the decision maker that I’m a trade union rep. Management has been unable to give any other reason.

It has been very encouraging that 18 branches have submitted motions to the PCS conference in May about my case, despite the fact that most branches had already held their AGM by the time I was sacked. I believe some of them are calling for strike action across the 30-plus DWP contact centres in the country. So that’s another avenue we’re exploring.

Does the national union agree that you are being victimised?

They have publicly stated that in their view, if it wasn’t for my high profile as a trade union rep, I would not have been dismissed. A national circular about my case has gone out to all reps in the DWP, who represent more than 110,000 members. My case has featured prominently on the union’s website, so they’ve been very good about publicising it. They are clear that this is an attack on the whole union.

Of course, there have been other attacks in recent years.

Yes. A little under 9,000 people work in the contact centre network and in the last 12 months 151 have been sacked on ‘attendance management’ grounds, which is a staggering one in 60. There is very much a ‘survival of the fittest’ strategy going on. If you have a disability or an underlying health issue - tough. Management are not going to deal with any of these issues: they are simply going to replace you. They have got to cut staff numbers, so they’re trying to get rid of those people with underlying health issues. Many of those people will have great difficulty finding another job.

It’s become a very target-driven culture. You can only spend so many minutes on the phone with a claimant, then you feel the pressure to get rid of them. You are permanently monitored. Once you are logged onto your computer, they know what you’re doing every single minute of the day. It’s become very intense - and of course, this kind of environment breeds depression and long-term health issues.

In addition to that, from this summer it will be very difficult to get an employment tribunal, which for many members is the last resort to fight against discrimination and unfair dismissal. Members will have to pay between £250 and £950. Lots of people won’t be able to afford this amount of money and the union will be very wary about which cases it is going to support.

The target-driven culture in the contact centres was recently exposed by The Guardian with the leaked emails of a contact centre manager.

I have to be careful how I formulate this. The Guardian described how employees in the contact centre are under pressure to reach targets for referring claimants for sanctions on their benefits: this includes cuts to benefits or even cutting off all benefits for not ‘actively looking for work’. Usually managers don’t write this down: they just tell the workers and, if they don’t meet targets, they get called in and threatened with ‘performance action’ against them. One manager in Waltham Forest actually wrote it down and this was forwarded to The Guardian. Very quickly, other leaks followed and this has exposed how arbitrarily many of these decisions on sanctions are being made. There is culture of total control - not just over the workforce, but the claimants too.

tina.becker@weeklyworker.org.uk