Our Hours campaign tour of Wales enters final leg
Telecoms & Financial Services October 17 2019A touring odyssey in which an intrepid bunch of CWU reps are criss-crossing Wales & The Marches in pantomime robber outfits to highlight the unfair treatment of an ever-growing percentage of Openreach engineers who are forced to work for up to two hours a day for free is now entering its final two days.
Since the Our Hours campaign tour hit the road on Monday in a specially branded ‘battlevan’ the self-styled ‘CWU time-bandits’ from the region’s three T&FS branches have remained resolutely in costume, making the point that members’ time is effectively being ‘stolen’ on account of discrepancies in contracts that see some employees compensated for their travelling time, but others forced to work for up to 10 hours a week for nothing..
In the three days since the travelling CWU roadshow kicked off with an early morning ‘raid’ on Carmarthen Telephone Exchange, the heroes of the hour have already spoken to hundreds of members at 11 workplaces and one branch meeting. Time and again they’ve heard first-hand accounts of the frustration of those required to give Personal Travel Time (PTT) are feeling – not just on account of the unfairness inherent in the fact that their longer-serving colleagues don’t have to give it , but also because of the impact earlier start times and later finish times necessitated by PTT have on their work-life balance.
Amongst those poignantly explaining the problem were two new dads from Carmarthen who lamented the fact that the PTT they are forced to give at either end of the day means they barely get to see their babies awake. That message of PPT’s intrusion into family and social life has been reinforced at every subsequent tour stop – with young members attending a Mid Wales, The Marches & North Staffs branch meeting in Shrewsbury on Tuesday night explaining the difficulty of making plans for their evenings given the unpredictability as to whether they could have up to an hours unpaid travel time having finished their last job of the day .
Other workplaces visited to date have included the Gors Road TEC in Swansea; Bridgend TEC; the Forest Farm depot in Cardiff – where well over 50 members queued to sign the union’s Our Hours petition on Tuesday morning. Next on the itinerary was Newport ATE, followed by Hereford, while yesterday ((Wednesday) began with an early morning stop at Shrewsbury telephone exchanges, followed by visits to Oswestry TEC and Wrexham TEC in the afternoon. In between the scheduled site visits the CWU ‘time bandits’ have been making their presence felt at a host of landmark locations, including Kidwell Castle and BT’s high security earth satellite tracking station where, perhaps predictably, their comic-book style robber outfits resulted in them being denied access by security!
Today (Thursday) the penultimate day of the Wales & The Marches Our Hours tour began with an early morning ‘raid’ on Chester TEC – and this afternoon it will be Rhyl telephone exchange’s turn to receive the ‘time bandit’ treatment.
That just leaves Bangor TEC on the itinerary for Friday, followed by a final stop at Wales’s mightiest landmark of all – Mount Snowdon.
See blow-by-blow reportage, including videos and pictures at South Wales Branch’s twitter feed @cwu_southwales or its Facebook account @cwusouthwales
Click here to sign the Our Hours petition
What the members are saying:
The real-life impact of Personal Travel Time (PTT) is graphically illustrated in the below comments sent in by Service Delivery members across Wales just prior to the Our Hours tour in response to a CWU appeal for explanations as to what PTT means in practice:
“I was sent out on loan 1 hour away, at the end of my normal working hours I had stay another hour to complete the job. So I left at 6pm and didn’t get home till 7pm. My wife was unhappy, my tea was spoilt and I had to eat on my own as you can’t expect my children to wait until 7pm to eat their evening meal. On another occasion I missed my doctor’s appointment for very similar reasons to above.
“I’m logging onto My Jobs usually around 7am to see where the systems as decided to send me and plan what time I need to leave home to arrive at my first job by 8am. Thus I feel I’m logged
onto work 1 hours before I actually have to be. (8am is my start time).”
“Being sent out on loan 1-plus hours away without notice puts a lot of pressure on me to be home at a respectable time in order to take my children to swimming lessons etc. I often have to miss my evening meal because there isn’t enough time once I get back home to eat and then take the kids out. I find myself eating as late 10pm – not good really.”
“The hour has a big effect on my life personally. As well as the ‘hour’ you are required to give to complete a job, having the hour drive home can sometimes mean I have to give 2 hours at night. Due to childcare issue I’m on a tight timescale in an evening, especially if they send me out of area which requires an hour travel time. I personally wouldn’t take a job which an hour from my house for childcare reason.
My partner is in university trying to become a nurse. We have a little girl and sometimes I need to pick her up from school. I have been sent out on loan to another patch that’s just under an hour drive. If my work goes past 4:10 and I have to travel home for one hour I could be late to pick my daughter up. I have to pick up my daughter by 6. One evening I managed to get there bang on 6. If I was any later the after-school club could have contacted social services. When I am working so far away with the 1 hours travel time I sometimes skip lunch to make sure I finish by 4:10 just so I can get home early enough. This has caused me a considerable amount of stress. It has caused arguments at home.”