National Contact Centre
One important piece of new service delivery work that has been created since the Covid Pandemic hit all of us, has been around Contact Tracing. National Services Scotland and Public Health Scotland have been working closely to deliver this vital piece of work, as directed from Scottish Government. This has resulted in additional staff being recruited, either onto fixed term contracts, or into a staff bank.
The volume of work undertaken by all levels of staff in this area has been huge, and credit must go to all our staff delivering this service. It is therefore disappointing that when issues arise, our Scottish Political Parties sitting in opposition to Government, decide to enter into party politics and seriously criticise the delivery of the service, which in essence is a criticism of Unison members carrying out their roles! And whilst criticism is sometimes warranted, the manner in how some of this was portrayed through the media, was a direct attack on our members.
However, it cannot be denied that the creation of this new service has brought with it some important staff concerns. And when staff have concerns, we invariably see an increase in Unison membership in these areas. That has certainly been true in this instance, and we have seen many new Unison members joining the branch that are directly employed within NCC.
Staffing issues/concerns are now progressed through the NCC Partnership Group that was created at the insistence of Unison. Unison, Senior Management and HR meet bi-weekly to discuss and take matters forward. One of the main contentious issues that has arisen, is the rigid rosters for our full time staff, and how this impacts on their work life balance. At the time of writing this article, we have agreed a group to operate in full partnership to review these rosters, and hopefully make changes that will benefit our staff going forward. Any other new issues that impact on staff will be discussed and taken forward by the Partnership Group.
Unison were also conscious that it was imperative we had some internal Unison activists within NCC. Therefore, we have now formally elected Paul McCusker as a branch steward for the purposes of NCC Unison matters. In the long term, this will hopefully provide extra support to members in NCC alongside what has been there from the outset.
Phone Photograph by Nicolas Nova CC BY-NC 2.0