Silcar Communications employee consultations
Silcar Communications (now part of Visionstream/Ventia) will hold a number of employee consultation sessions in the coming weeks to report on progress in the negotiations for a new Enterprise Agreement.
The consolidation of a number of former Leighton’s companies over recent years culminated in the formation of Ventia in 2015, trading under the Visionstream banner. The company is now wanting to align conditions across its workforce as much as possible using, it would appear, the current Visionstream Field Workforce Agreement as the benchmark.
The aim is to create the basis for a single agreement when the Field Workforce comes up for renegotiation in 2018.
The problem is that that in a number of key areas the current Silcar Communications Agreement is providing much better conditions than the Field Workforce Agreement e.g. a 36 ¾ hour rather than a 38 hour week, all overtime paid at double time and better redundancy payments.
Silcar is currently proposing to buy out some of these conditions and will be testing that proposal at the coming meetings.
At this stage though, feedback to the CWU suggests that more money will have to be put on the table for this approach to be attractive to employee.
