We shouldn’t forget that even in the midst of a national economic crisis, a potential hiving off of the NHS to privateers and opportunists, a planned pension robbery and, last but not least, poor innocent cucumbers around the world being falsely accused of death and destruction (when it was the sprouts all along (or was it?)), life for the Union still goes on within the LAS.
Unfortunately there will never be a time that will be ‘issue free’ while working within the LAS. Management and staff, in any organisation, will clash at times and not see eye to eye. We are no different. In the political adult world of work not everyone gets what they want all of the time.
The nature of the job, the size of the Service, the Capital City environment, the workload and the pressure of targets are just a few of the reasons why, when one issue is put quietly to bed, another two emerge from under the duvet screaming and shouting!
It seems sometimes like those Whac-a-Mole games at the fairground. Each time you wallop one on the head with the mallet, more spring up all over the place, taunting and grinning!
The point is that problems and issues are with us all the time. The good news though is that the Union is with us all the time too.
No mallets, no magic wands, no false rhetoric. Just hard working representatives doing the best they can and succeeding on so many levels, so many times, at so many occasions. We tend to forget that.
We overlook the work of local representatives and members sometimes when we are focusing on the ‘bigger picture’.
The bigger picture is of great importance of course, particularly at this time, and the Union should never take its eye off the ball, but, that said, nothing will be accomplished if we overlook the fact that the bigger picture is made up of smaller pictures, and those smaller pictures are made up of real people with real issues.
There are some over-arching issues of course that just won’t go away. Our UNISON Senior Representatives are dealing with some at the moment including Rest Breaks and Managing Attendance Policy (MAP).
We can argue until the cows come home about the rights and wrongs of our Rest Break Policy, but the fact is that it has never been fully implemented as it was intended.
In fairness our management accept that, and also accept that they have never, operationally, been able to deliver on the agreed average target of at least 75% of staff having a break on each shift.
They believe that one barrier to achieving this target is that road staff have to return to their own station to have their break, and, therefore, if they could be ‘stood down’ other places (hospitals, other ambulance stations etc) then more breaks could be given.
The Union does not accept that argument. This issue sits with the Joint Secretaries at present and more information will be sent out as soon as possible.
The other perennial problem is the Managing Absence Policy. We would like this reviewed. Many staff see this policy as a punishment for being ill and not as a support mechanism to help them back to work.
The policy at present is seen as a mathematical formula to deal with numbers and not in any holistic way to deal with the person.
UNISON wants to see the right balance, difficult as it is, between supporting staff back to work who have been ill or injured through the course of their duty, while also dealing with those cases that put pressure on everyone else by taking inappropriate time off work.
We want to work with the Service to achieve this.
Not everything in our current policy is bad, and not every manager treats staff in the wrong way by any means. UNISON strongly acknowledge this, but we also acknowledge that not all staff who are off sick are ‘swinging the lead’.
The trick is to get everyone within the service to acknowledge this as all of us need to pull together to get us through these difficult times.
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 Information of all issues can be found elsewhere on our website.
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Eric Roberts
Branch Secretary
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