Good news for workers seeking to defend pensions - with a High Court ruling against IBM over the closure of their final salary pension scheme to future accrual. The core of the ruling is that the way the pension scheme was closed breached the contractual duty of trust and confidence.
The ruling is here. There are many reports online, including from the legal team for the pension fund trustee, Professional Pensions and Employee Benefits.
IBM has already said it intends to appeal.
This week IBM staff took their campaign against the closure of their pension scheme to parliament, with a Westminster Hall debate.
If the posts to the "Association of Members of IBM UK Pension Plans" forums are anything to go by, there is an astonishing growth of union membership at IBM, once a bastion of non-unionism.
It's good to see UNITE working to ensure that this builds organisation, not just membership, with UNITE meetings open to all IBM staff organised for:
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I posted previously about IBM joining the disreputable band of companies reneging on their promises to employees and trying to close their final salary pension schemes.
Given IBM's history as a bastion of non-trade-unionism, I didn't really expect IBMers to put up much of a fight. It's beginning to look like I might be wrong - the feeling of betrayal amongst long-serving and loyal employees seems to be overcoming a lot of the suspicions and misconceptions about unions.
An employee forum meeting at the Hursley site near Southampton on Tuesday had to be relocated twice to larger venues, eventually being held in an open area with about 150 staff present. Criticism of senior management was greeted with loud applause.
Large numbers of staff are now joining UNITE and it's great to see an IBM section of the union web site carrying lots of advice and updates for IBMers.
You can get a real sense of the depth and breadth of anger if you look at the forums on the web site of the Association of Members of IBM UK Pension Plans (AMIPP). You can also see how quickly people can grasp the need for collective organisation when faced with such a major threat to their livelihoods.
Last month IT & Communications had the highest recruitment rate of any sector in the former Amicus section of UNITE, which is truly remarkable when you consider what has been going on in Construction or Finance for example. If the reaction of IBM staff is anything to go by, this pattern seems likely to continue.
One of the greatest weapons in the hands of IT services employers when pushing attacks on us is that if we fight back they will lose contracts and we will lose jobs. This seems a much less credible argument if staff at other major IT companies are fighting back at the same time. Of course the real threat to our employment doesn't generally come from losing outsourcing contracts - many staff in the sector have been TUPEd from employer to employer repeatedly as contracts are won and lost. The real threat to jobs comes from employers getting away with jacking up profits at our expense, leaving fewer people doing longer hours under more pressure to cope with more work.
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I posted some time ago about Fujitsu's attack on Defined Benefit pensions, arguing that it was of wide significance.
Since then a slew of other companies have announced their intention to close final salary (defined benefit) pension schemes, including Barclays, BP, Morrisons and most recently IBM.
Many of the companies attacking pensions are financially strong. What we are seeing is an attempt to permanently shift wealth from the workforce to shareholders and permanently shift risk from the shareholders to the workforce. The recession is providing a convenient smokescreen under which to try to force through these attacks in the hope that workers will feel less confident to fight back and the companies will suffer less staff attrition.
So far, the evidence suggests that workers are not falling for the con.
At Fujitsu, where I work, there is a strong mood to fight if necessary. UNITE membership across the company has increased by over 20% already this year, largely through our campaign on pay and pensions. We were planning to start a consultative ballot on Monday, but have paused this process after the company agreed that the "consultation period" would not end as soon as they originally planned. We have an appeal leaflet summarising the issues available online, and news is posted on our news blog. One enthusiastic member has even set up an unofficial web site with an internet radio station for the campaign!
While the outcome of these attempts to close pension schemes in the private sector is still undecided, the media and Tory politicians have launched an absolutely massive propaganda offensive. They want to misdirect the anger of private sector workers against public sector workers, instead of against their own employers and the government. It is hard to turn on a news programme without hearing of "gold plated" public sector pension schemes.
Trade unionists should always oppose any effort to divide workers - it always leaves us weaker. But this attempt to divide us on private-public lines is particularly dangerous given that around 50% of union members are in the public sector. The Tories and media are trying to mobilise the majority of the population against half the trade union movement. We fall for this at our peril.
The reality is that in the public sector, as in the private, the real divisions are between the top and the bottom. There is justifiable anger about MPs pensions, when they do nothing to protect ours. But to turn that anger against (for example) local government workers who on average get a pension of under £8000 is wrong.
In the face of this recession we need to unite workers from public and private sector against attempts to make working people pay for an economic crisis we didn't create.