| Grocery Retail & Logistics sector |
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We have been active now for 18 months and have steering
committee and combine that’s building bigger and better.
This has produced the
Minimum Standards Agreement, produced by all in the combine
submitting their T&C’s from which a new contract of T&C’s
was formed. This agreement looks at pay, overtime rates, sickness
benefits, agency usage. This agreement provides a base
for retail distribution representatives to work from and a
platform which would potenially help companies within
the retail distribution achieve a more productive workforce by
imlamenting standards that their employees may find exceptable, the
final draft is in two parts, one for warehouse members and one
for driver members.
The Organising Unit has successfully reached agreement with some
of the big name food retailers on the High Street such as ASDA to
conform to this minimum standards agreement within its supply
chain. This has been a huge victory as the ASDA group are an
anti-union group. This was achieved by getting in
to the meat industry and mapping it and building on union
membership strength and producing the evidence needed to show ASDA
what was happening in their third party suppliers.
The retail distribution sector has thousands of UNITE
the UNION warehouse /driver members and already their elected union
representatives gives them a service which is second to none,
however, with there being such a diverse of distribution sites
within the retail sector who, not only depend on their own core
workforce when it comes to filling supermarket shelfs they also
rely heavely on agency workers, migrant workers and third party
suppliers, so some level of protection was needed to cover all,
with the help of our organising department we set about building
something which would cement us all together.
