Travel time justice demanded in Openreach

Telecoms & Financial Services, Openreach December 13 2018

A major new CWU campaign is getting underway in Openreach, with the union demanding fair and equal treatment of employees on the issue of travel to and from the first and last jobs of the day.

Anger at discrepancies in contracts that see some engineers paid for their travelling time, but others forced to give up to two hours a day for free, has been mounting since 2011 when the business introduced the Mobile Workforce and put new recruits outside of the existing Parking at Home policy.

Following negotiations with the company, a 2012 agreement briefly resolved the issue by extending that policy to cover the Mobile workforce – but then Openreach reneged on the deal, introducing a 60-minute Personal Travel Time (PTT) system for that group of workers.

“We’ve been battling ever since to try to get PTT removed,” stresses assistant secretary Davie Bowman – but Openreach has remained intransigent despite profound doubts being cast over the appropriateness of its position by a 2015 European Court of Justice ruling.

The Court’s decision in the so-called ‘Tyco’ case means that travel time spent by mobile workers getting to, and returning home from, their first and last allocated jobs of the day is now legally deemed to constitute ‘work’.

As such it counts towards the 48-hours allowed under the EU Working Time Directive (WTD) – leaving many mobile engineers at Openreach within a whisker of that limit – even before overtime is taken into account.

“Openreach can’t get away from the fact that if you travel for an hour at the beginning and end of the working day, and work a 37.5 hour week, you’re already up to 47.5 hours,” Davie points out.

Earlier this year CWU Annual Conference gave its unequivocal backing to a composite motion tabled by the Executive and some Branches committing the union to seek to equalise Openreach members’ travel-time rights and achieve full compliance with the WTD.

Accusing the business of continually ‘changing the way in which work is delivered at the start and end of day in an attempt to push people to work longer and longer hours,’ the proposition instructed the Executive to ‘negotiate with Openreach to remove this unfair contractual obligation to given personal travel time from existing and future contracts.’

The first phase of the CWU’s latest attempt to force a change of heart from Openreach involves harnessing a groundswell of grassroots’ anger amongst not just those on PPT contracts but also those benefiting from the Parking at Home policy.

The CWU is also seeking to raise awareness of the particular problems faced by those on PTT contracts amongst the desk-based staff who actually issue the work, in the hope that greater consideration can be exercised when issuing jobs.

“Our members in the field are already very aware of an unfairness that is blatant when you have people working side by side but some paid for up to two hours less for an otherwise identical day’s work,” stresses Davie.

“We now need to build on that awareness by way of leaflet drops, a social media campaign amongst our membership and a workforce petition that will ultimately be delivered direct to Openreach CEO Clive Selley.

“If we’re going to shift the company’s position here, our first task is to mobilise our membership around the call for fairness, equality and justice,” Davie concludes