Fujitsu redundancy plans are discriminatory, says union

Fujitsu workers are on strike today

Union Unite says it has found evidence that a disproportionate number of women, part-time and ethnic minority workers have been selected for redundancy at Fujitsu.

Fujitsu strongly denies any allegation of discrimination, saying it has processes to prevent this happening.

The union's claim is the latest salvo in an ongoing battle between the two organisations over Fujitsu's plans to close the main final salary pension scheme for future claims, as well as to make 876 redundancies in the UK.

Fujitsu's unite members today began their fourth day of strike action over the firm's plans.

Peter Skyte, Unite national officer for IT and communications, said there has been no response from the company to queries on the subject.

“We are disturbed to find that a disproportionate number of women, part-time and ethnic minority workers appear to have been selected for redundancy at Fujitsu," he said.

"This strengthens our case for a fairer, open and more transparent pay system which we also suspect may be masking potential discrimination."

The union says it has identified major discrepancies in the scoring and selection for redundancy and has obtained actual data for the company's Application Services Capability unit, which employs around 1,500 people in the UK.

Unite says the data reveals that women, part-time workers and non-white employees were disproportionately scored lower than their male, full-time and white colleagues across the four criteria used to select people for compulsory redundancy.

It says 6.7 per cent of women were selected for compulsory redundancy compared with 3.7 per cent of men, while 10.4 per cent of Indians were selected against 3.9 per cent for all other ethnic groups.

And Fujitsu awarded the highest score on the "Critical Skills" criterion to 4.46 per cent of women and 18.41 per cent of men, according to Unite.

The union says the probability of this distribution happening by chance is less likely than a jackpot win on the lottery.

A spokesman for Fujitsu did not specifically contest these figures, though he did say it was not clear how they had been reached.

"When you start extrapolating numbers from a small sample sometimes anomalies occur," he said.

Fujitsu said in an official statement: "As an equal opportunities employer Fujitsu consulted on the proposed selection criteria with elected employee representatives and with representatives of its recognised trade unions (including Unite) and is confident that no discrimination resulted."