[BITList] QANTAS Lockout.

[HUGH]

John,

He may well have lost any marbles he ever had.

I had experience of an equally dismal lockout, though hardly on the same scale as the Qantas affair.

There was a piddling one day token strike (don't ask me what "token" meant) in this area, involving the drawing offices in a local shipyard - they had a local grievance. The DO I was in had nothing to do with it, and we worked (or didn't work) as usual.  Nonetheless, on the morning after the strike, our management handed the office boy a pile of letters to hand out to those named on the envelopes, ie, all of us. We were sacked forthwith, all of us (ie, permanently locked out immediately), for having participated in the strike. "WTF?" we asked ourselves, and prepared to pack up and leave. "What's up?" asked they who had handed out the notices, on seeing a flurry of activity and hearing angry voices where before there had been calm. "Hang on," they said, on reading the letter one chap had received, "This is news to us."  "Well, you handed the ****ing things out", they were told. "Please give them back to us, we didn't read them", was the next move. But we didn't give them back.  We let the silly buggers stew for a while.  Up river a bit, the same notices had been handed out to the staff who had gone on strike, and, on reading them, they had a short meeting, then went home with their tools, not forgetting their coats. "What's the score with all this?" asked management of one chap exiting.  "You've sacked us all," he told them, and offered the sacking notice in evidence.  Management reacted as had our management, but it was next day before the staff came back.

Great fun.

Hugh.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20111030/f58958ce/attachment.shtml