Get back to the office! But why?

Good grief! Do unions operate in the nineteenth century or something?

In any case, it's not a very good argument for not working at home.

Galaxy only you seem to believe that employees working in isolation from home are not far more vulnerable to unfair practice by their employers. Should a worker start their employment with a company working from home they will never be able to have any contact with other employees as they would not even be aware of who they were.

Total isolation is the result with their employers able to tell them whatever they wish and impose whatever conditions on any such employees by way of having full access to simple division within the workforce.

Back to the eighteenth century turns of employment with employers in total control, the outcome of which can be seen in India and a china today.

Also, Galaxy if you can inform the trade unions how they can recruit persons working from home I am sure they would be very pleased that you have a solution to a major problem for them.

At present recruitment is in the main by way of activists in the workplace having contact with the employees and encouraging them to join. An employee working from home is totally isolated and can be unknown to very many others in the workforce and the employer is under no obligation to inform anyone of those home workers job roles or even of their existence as employees.

It should also be remembered that the weaker those trade unions become the weaker the Labour Party becomes both financially and in turns of the material support they receive from those unions.

But perhaps all the above is what you wish to see Galaxy.

growstuff

Good grief! Do unions operate in the nineteenth century or something?

In any case, it's not a very good argument for not working at home.

Another two line meaningless comment post which does not address the matter under debate whatsoever.

Don't unions have phones, email accounts and internet access with advertising and marketing possibilities? If a business can keep in touch with workers in their own homes, surely unions can? The home-office workers can also contact their union online if they have any concerns about their working conditions - assuming that their union representatives have made themselves known to them and have been seen to be approachable.

Grandad1943

growstuff

Good grief! Do unions operate in the nineteenth century or something?

In any case, it's not a very good argument for not working at home.

Another two line meaningless comment post which does not address the matter under debate whatsoever.

I was speechless at the irrelevance of your comment! I don't think you would have liked what I really wanted to write.

Grandad1943

growstuff

Good grief! Do unions operate in the nineteenth century or something?

In any case, it's not a very good argument for not working at home.

Another two line meaningless comment post which does not address the matter under debate whatsoever.

I was speechless at the irrelevance of your comment! I don't think you would have liked what I really wanted to write.

Grandad what are you talking about. No contact with other employees? It is Sunday, I am at home and somehow as if by magic I have been in contact with my team all day.

One of the team starts tomorrow, but guess what we already have met and know her, all from home.

Elegran

Don't unions have phones, email accounts and internet access with advertising and marketing possibilities? If a business can keep in touch with workers in their own homes, surely unions can? The home-office workers can also contact their union online if they have any concerns about their working conditions - assuming that their union representatives have made themselves known to them and have been seen to be approachable.

The unions have used online recruitment for many years. However, still the major percentage of recruitment is carried out by activists in workplaces speaking to new employees and encouraging them to join especially when they perceive problems in their employment.

White-collar employees working from home will not affect Unite and some other large unions as they in the main represent manual workers.

However, the GMB could be destroyed by widespread home working and they are right-wing in their political views and very much supporters of Starmer in his troubled relationship with Unite and the Rail Unions.

The above will make the Labour Party ever more dependent on the large very left-wing unions for their funding and I am sure there are many who claim to be supporters of the Labour Party on this forum who would certainly not wish to see that.

I dont agree with that wild prediction, but I think many women would like to see lots of changes with regard to the GMB.

Galaxy

I dont agree with that wild prediction, but I think many women would like to see lots of changes with regard to the GMB.

The GMB has been hit hard by the reduction and outsourcing of local authority jobs. With the GMB now having six hundred thousand members, there has been for some time talk of them merging into Unite.

However, I believe that there are many within Unite which are against such a merger on the grounds that the membership base would be too broad to be represented within one organisation.

www.channel4.com/news/keeping-office-workers-at-home-for-longer-could-be-the-right-way-to-go-to-contain-virus-says-virologist

The large CS department where my daughter (about 650 staff)works,is now getting everyone back mid September

Some of the staff were able to work from home, but it's been decided that office based is better.

Union is happy about it also

It appears that the staff want to be office based for many reasons

I reckon we'll see a lot office staff back in their workplace sooner rather than later

One of the unions advocating industrial action is the civil service union, the PCS. Mark Serwotka is/was a great supporter of Corbyn and Long-Bailey. How does that square up with what you're claiming Grandad?

Galaxy

I dont agree with that wild prediction, but I think many women would like to see lots of changes with regard to the GMB.

Indeed!

The GMB Union has been called "institutionally sexist" after an independent report into sexual harassment within the organisation.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54003606

PS. The teaching unions have over 500,000 members and there are other school staff in Unison. It's not a good idea for union people to upset them by insulting them.

PPS. Supporting union membership is not a good reason for anybody to go back to office working. If I were a union member and thought that my union wanted me to return to office work to increase its membership rather than caring about my well-being, I'd be incredibly concerned.

PPPS. Anybody supporting Starmer is not right-wing. They're more likely to be concerned about a realistic plan for a Labour government so that vulnerable and poorer people can genuinely be supported.

growstuff

One of the unions advocating industrial action is the civil service union, the PCS. Mark Serwotka is/was a great supporter of Corbyn and Long-Bailey. How does that square up with what you're claiming Grandad?

Industrial action over what?????????

growstuff Quote [ The GMB Union has been called "institutionally sexist" after an independent report into sexual harassment within the organisation.]End Quote

The GMB Union represent the Labour Party Central Office staff and have a separate Branch within that office.

The staff within the Labour Party Central office have been closely linked to the allegations of party employees working against Jeremy Corbyn and even acting against a Labour Party win in the 2018 general election.

It is also being alleged that those same employees sent racist, sexist and highly derogatory comments in regard to fellow Labour Party employees who did not share their view of Corbyn and his team in the Labour leaders office.

All the above was contained within the leaked report on anti Corbyn activity within central office. However, Tim Roach the General Secretary of the GMB union suddenly resigned his position within a few days of the above allegations being published in the media on "health grounds".

An internal investigation is underway by the GMB executive committee into the activities of Tim Roach while he was their General Secretary and in the meantime, the union is very much "in the wilderness" in terms of industrial and political policy, without leadership and losing members at a very fast rate.

The above may be the real reason why the executive committee of the Unite Union is seemingly very cool on the GMB being merged into their organisation. They may feel that they do not want to pick up the pieces of such a right-wing bundle of trouble when Unite has the election for the replacement to Len McCluskey on the horizon.

However, watch this space as it will, without doubt, be very much linked to the future of the Labour Party

Links to the above:-
www.politicshome.com/news/article/gmb-union-launches-investigation-after-tim-roache-abruptly-quits-as-head-of-major-union

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8325411/Police-investigate-claims-GMB-union-boss-casting-couch-culture.html

This government can never get it right can it?

Covid on a very worrying rise, so let’s get the civil servants back to work by the middle of September, just when it will be whizzing out of control again.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing they are competent about.

Oh come on! Cummings said that "hard rain is going to fall on the civil service". He's just killing a few of them off.

Grandad1943

growstuff

One of the unions advocating industrial action is the civil service union, the PCS. Mark Serwotka is/was a great supporter of Corbyn and Long-Bailey. How does that square up with what you're claiming Grandad?

Industrial action over what?????????

Ask Serwotka! He's the one talking about it. He might find it a bit strange you think he's right-wing.

Yesterday I was Face timing with DS. He and his family live in USA and he is a design engineer for an automotive company. He has often worked from home some days particularly if he needed to get a project finished.
He has been working from home since March but so has his wife and two sons - one a university student and the other at High School. They have all needed computers and a very good WiFi connection. They all all needed space and also a quiet area to work in. They do not live in a small house but it was not easy finding everyone their own space to work properly.
He said he needed to have daily zoom type meetings and doing that for 6-7 hours a day was extremely tiring - more so than seeing the people in the flesh.
The high school son is having video type lessons daily now with the new term starting and needs to be at his computer from 8am till 2 pm. The uni student has gone back to the uni but is isolated with his two flat mates as all their lectures etc are on line and they are cooking all their own meals instead of going to the various canteens on campus.
DS has now been told he will be working from home till at least next June which he says is causing him to rethink the plan of where to work as he had based himself in basically a cupboard as he needed to have a quiet space. The house being American is of course open plan and not conducive to quiet working spaces. He has already said he is sorry now he did not build himself an office when he did the basement out!
He has needed to buy himself a much better chair to be comfortable and he is already regretting not buying an even more expensive one. Luckily they already had their own computers so the only expense they had in that line was a second monitor for DS as he normally uses two at work.
I tell you all this simply to show that working from home is not all roses and many people would not have suitable living accommodation to facilitate this long term. Apart from space and the correct office type furniture these people also need a very good internet connection and should be recompensed for the cost of this and maybe the fact their heating bills will be higher if the dwelling is normally empty all day.
Having staff working from home should not be a saving for the employer but an extra cost for the employees. For people living on their own it is often difficult and going to work and seeing people is often the greatest contact they have with others.

My son-in-law has worked from home for years. His second phone line was paid for by his employer, and so was the office chair he uses. That has been upgraded recently as he was getting backache from the previous one. He is in phone, email and online contact with colleagues in many different countries. Physically meeting up with them would involve a lot of time-consuming, tiring and expensive travel His "office" is in his open-plan living/dining/kitchen room.

Until lockdown, his wife went into the office every day. She now works from home too, based in a small spare room. She meets up with colleagues very occasionally, but most contact is by phone, email or zoom. There are no plans to get her or her colleagues back into the office yet.

For them, it works very well. Their work is mainly on a computer anyway, and they are responsible adults, not naughty children bunking off school because there is no-one to see whether they are getting on with what needs done or playing computer games. There must be many many people doing exactly the same.

I have to agree with grandad re his post of 6 September relating to council employees. Our council office workers are not required to return to work until the New Year and even then only on some kind of rota basis. It’s very difficult to contact anyone in our local council and they do not reply to e mails either. County Hall has just been completely modernised at great expense and is just lying empty. So, while working from home may be logical and successful for some businesses it certainly is not working re our local council and for the community. No doubt there will be a rise in council tax as well!!!

Welshwife Just because your son and his family are having difficulties all working at home doesn't mean that's the norm. It's not surprising with 4 people needing access to computers and wi-fi etc.

Once again you are stating the obvious - that not everyone can cope with being at home and need to be with other people.

No one on here is suggesting that everyone works from home. Some people will manage successfully and others won't but most aren't being forced to do one or the other.