BRITISH GAS/ CENTRICA ENGINEERS ARE ON STRIKE AGAINST THE FIRE-AND-REHIRE ATTACK ON WORKER’S CONTRACTS
CHRIS O’SHEA, BOSS OF CENTRICA/ BRITISH GAS, TAKES HOME £775,000 WHILST PUSHING THROUGH NEW CONTRACTS THAT WILL SEE WORKERS LOSE THOUSANDS
VOICE SPOKE WITH A STRIKING ENGINEER EARLIER THIS MONTH WHO SAID HE’S STANDING UP TO THE “BULLYING TACTICS OF THE COMPANY” BY STRIKING WITH HIS COLLEAGUES.
By Mark S Redfern & George Mills
The bosses of British Gas (parent company, Centrica) have been threatening to fire and rehire their engineers on new contracts with worse terms and conditions, prompting two rounds of strike action by the GMB Union.
GMB members entered a second round of strikes on January 20th in their fight against executives hoping to maximise profits for the company by squeezing workers, specifically through firing-and-rehiring them on contracts with more hours and less pay. Some workers are set to lose around £12,000 under the proposed new arrangement. Striking workers were due to protest outside The Senedd in Cardiff on Friday 29th January to promote the strike and put pressure on politicians to act.
Fire and rehire tactics are becoming more common across the whole employment sector – but who are the people at the top making the decisions which have prompted the fight-back?
British Gas is owned by the private UK company Centrica which houses some big hitters in their upper management.
Chris O’Shea, CEO, and Matthew Bateman, managing director, are the principle bosses, living on huge salaries that stand in stark contrast to the reduced pay they are trying to impose on engineers.
O’Shea, pictured, above, alone takes home over three-quarters of a million pounds with his £775,000 annual salary. He has had a long corporate career, including the position of “Tax Advisor” in the tax-dodging fossil fuel company Shell.
BG Group, a British oil company, also employed O’Shea for nearly seven years and during his time there he held several senior positions whilst the chief executive quietly drained the company bank of £28 million for “performance-related” bonuses.
The serial executive also sat on the board of the FTSE 100 industrial supplies company Smiths Group.
British Gas was privatised in 1986 as the then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced the Gas Act as part of her campaign to privatise national utilities, which resulted in huge profits being made from what were once nationalised industries. Centrica bought British Gas in 1997.
Centrica’s management of British Gas has long been in freefall, demonstrated by customers leaving the company in droves over recent years.
O’Shea was appointed to the company in April 2020 – his thinking on how to bolster profits was on full display when his opening move was to sack 5,000 employees just a couple of months into his tenure.
The news of job losses was reported alongside redundancies in other industries that became grimly routine in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic as companies tried to push the cost of the crisis onto workers, although mass sackings at British Gas looked to be on the horizon with or without the emergence of the coronavirus.
Managing Director Matthew Bateman has been recently caught out in Zoom meeting footage, released by the GMB Union, pleased with the fact that the pandemic was keeping news of strikes earlier in January out of the headlines.
This has only added fuel to accusations from unions that the company is using coronavirus as a “smokescreen” to pass changes to employee contracts.
Despite their insistence on labour cost-cutting, Centrica are actually reaping fantastic profits from British Gas workers.
The company announced that the first six months of 2020 they yielded an adjusted operating profit of £229 MILLION from their UK domestic heating business alone.
voice.wales spoke with a striking British Gas engineer from Cardiff earlier this month who said that he was striking with his colleagues because of the squeeze Centrica are putting on their new contracts.
He told voice.wales: “If I stay with the company, the new contracts will result in me losing out on around £10k-£12k annually based on the amount of weekends and overtime working I personally do.”
“The company is still refusing to renegotiate and insist that they will continue to fire and rehire any employee who hasn’t signed the new contract by 1st April. And that’s why we’re striking. To remove the threat of fire and rehire and get back round the table and come to a negotiated agreement.”
It’s unlikely that the bosses will win over the hearts of their workers as it stands.
Last year O’Shea was anointed “Scrooge of the Year” by the GMB Union – the public perception of Centrica’s cadre of high-flyers won’t change any time soon either.
