ONS staff to vote again on dispute over working from home

Union members at the Office for National Statistics are being reballoted on whether to continue taking industrial action in a long-running dispute over working from home.

More than 1,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) have been refusing to follow an instruction to come into the office two days a week since May.

The 1,179 workers based in Newport, Titchfield in Hampshire, London, Darlington, Manchester and Edinburgh, recently refused to work overtime.

With their six-month strike mandate running out next month, the union is balloting members for a new mandate to allow their action to continue.

PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said: “Management’s mandatory workplace attendance regime does nothing to improve productivity but everything to disrupt the lives of ONS staff, who were led to believe they could continue to work from home indefinitely.

“Our ongoing action has allowed our members to continue those flexible arrangements without damaging the organisation’s outputs.

“The employer’s continuing refusal to talk to us, however, means we need to ballot members again to increase the pressure for a sensible, negotiated outcome.”

The ballot ends on October 1.

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