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Fujitsu staff will strike from midnight over pay, pensions and layoffs

ACAS conciliation service talks worked well, then

Unionised staff at Fujitsu are downing tools for 24 hours from midnight in protest over cuts to jobs, pay and pensions. It appears the conciliation service ACAS failed to find a common ground that suited all parties.

Trade union Unite was unable to say how many of its 1,200 members employed at Fujitsu will be on the picket line but reckoned roughly 60 per cent of a circa 500-strong turnout had voted for industrial action.

“We are expecting a decent gathering [tomorrow], people are very upset, particularly as Fujitsu Voice was taken away before consultation started,” Ian Tonks, Unite national officer for IT told The Register.

As we exclusively revealed, Fujitsu Voice – the employee works council – was disbanded in the autumn just after the company confirmed to 1,800 staff that they were at risk of redundancy. It claimed at the time that a Europe-wide version would replace it.

The pay-offs are set to start this year and trickle into 2018 as Fujitsu, like IBM and HPE, tries to slash its wage bill by exporting more jobs in services to parts of the world where wages are lower.

Unite, which was already representing staff amid claims of a 16 per cent gender pay gap and a retrospective pay cut of up to 15 per cent for staff aged over 60, responded by organising multiple strike days.

Action was halted for around six weeks from mid-January as ACAS chaired discussions between Unite and Fujitsu.

Fujitsu refused to comment. ®

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