The following disturbing report appeared in Motor Transport on 264114656
“Municipal bus employers who shrink from invoking the penalty clause covering unofficial strikes in the new 40-hour week and bonus agreenent reached on Fricay last week for the industry will risk expulsion from the Federation of Municipal Passenger Transport Employers. The agreement confers a length-of-service bonus of from 10s per week _(for employees with 6 months! service) to 30s (for those with 20 years! service). But it also includes a clause stating that these payments shall be subject to forfeiture for absence other than that justifiable through sickness, or leave of absence. If the absence is individual, service pay will be forfeited for the week during which it occurs. If the absence is "collective" on the part of a number of employees the current six months! service pay~ ment will be automatically withheld from themee. The reference to “collective absencé’ was substituted at the eleventh hour for “unofficial strike" in order to render the draft agreement more palatable to union leiers who had to report back to their delegates. Inclusion of the word "automatic" is highly significant since it not only relieves a general manager of the unpleasant decision whether or not to stop the bonus payment for six months if there is an unofficial stoppage, but it gives him no choice in the matter, Failure to apply the six-month sanction becomes just as much a violation of the national agreement as unauthorized deviation from national wage rates, which in the past has cost Birmingham, Rochdale, Iuton and Reading membership of the federation, For an employee with 20 years! or more service on buses the consequences of joining an unofficial dispute could be the loss of 30s a week for six months thereafter, or £39 in all before tax. This could well prove a more powerful deterrent to stch action than the loss of two or three days! full earnings, and would clearly give employegs even‘more cause to think where they were contemplating the .all-too-frequent one-day strikeseceeces There will be a right of appeal by an ag@rieved body of workerSeees" Aldermen Warris, cheirmen of thc enployers! federation hailed all this as “a new ccncept of industrigl reletions “in this country." He may be more right thkn he thinks } ~~ ee