Site workers wary of national agreement

A first draft giving the details of the proposed new national agreement for the engineering construction industry is set to be tabled next week for consideration by a joint working party of contractors and unions.

But site workers will be looking to the meeting to allay fears that the agreement may contain a hidden agenda of multi-skilling and a dilution of trade skills.

The so-called Industry Framework Agreement is due to replace the 25-year-old National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI) when the current settlement expires in April 2007.

A broad outline of the replacement agreement was drawn up earlier this year. It proposes a universally applicable core set of terms and conditions plus specific provisions for four sub-sectors of the industry.

However, minutes of a meeting of the industry’s national shop stewards forum reveal wide-ranging grass roots concerns about the outline document. Workers are particularly worried about its reference to the “flexible application” of the proposed terms and conditions. They want to know exactly what that implies.

It was recorded that “the impression that was given by many employers on site was that they interpreted flexibility as multi-skilling with a dilution and merging of trade specific skills”.

Many employees are also suspicious that employers were effectively seeking to undermine national bargaining by splitting the agreement into separate sectors and local company agreements. There is unanimous rejection of the plans for pay simplification – specifically the loss of supplementary payments.

Proposals for the regulated use of agency labour are another contentious issue. Although stewards recognised that the use of non-UK labour was inevitable, they want assurances that foreign workers would not be used to undercut domestic labour.

Clarification was also sought regarding any fall-back position should negotiations on a new agreement break down.

Leaders of the Capital Project Clients Group attended the meeting of the working group, which is developing the deal. They expressed their support for continued national collective bargaining and the establishment of the NAECI replacement.

[Contract Journal, 27 September 2006, p 4]