Since May, officials working for statistics agency have been required to spend two fifths of their hours in the office and, after non-compliance, are now set to take work-to-rule action
Workers at the Office for National Statistics will escalate their office-attendance dispute with the organisation’s management.
The ONS has, since April, mandated that its staff must spend at least 40% of their hours in the office. In response, officials at the department who are members of the PCS union have been taking action short of strike since May in the form of non-compliance with the policy.
After three months of this protest, PCS says it will now broaden its action to include work-to-rule – under which employees perform their duties strictly to the letter of their contract, refusing to take on any additional duties – from 27 August.
Since May, PCS has advised its members to spend as much or as little time in the office as they choose, rather than meet an arbitrary quota. It said the action has been “well supported and has had no adverse effect on productivity, proving PCS’s point that maximum flexibility is the best policy all round”.
The union said ONS management has not yet penalised anyone for non-compliance, but has “refused to engage with us to negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome”.
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PCS said the policy “does nothing to improve efficiency but robs staff of the flexibility to manage childcare and other domestic responsibilities and forces them to undertake unnecessary – and often very lengthy – journeys to carry out work that they could have done from home, often via virtual meetings with colleagues in other offices”.
The union said the escalation of the action follows a survey of its ONS members, in which 88% of respondents supported a continuation of action short of strike and 66% backed strike action if necessary.
PCS warned that if it does not receive a positive response from management, it will ballot members in September to renew its industrial action mandate, which ends in October, with the option of escalating the action to strikes.
“Our members just want to be able to do their jobs in the most efficient way possible – which means having maximum flexibility on the balance between home and office working,” said PCS’s ONS group president, Grant Williams. “The legal protection provided by our action has enabled them to do just that over the last few months and there has been no detriment to the organisation. But if ONS management think that our dispute will simply fizzle out when our current mandate expires, they are deeply mistaken. We have been open to talking to management all along and we appeal to them to take that opportunity now.”
A spokesperson for the Office for National Statistics said: “We believe firmly that a reasonable level of office attendance – in line with the wider civil service – is in the best interests of the ONS and all our colleagues. Face-to-face interaction supports personal collaboration, learning and innovation.”
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