Unity

3rd May 2007	INDEX
3rd May 2007 Private and Confidential Dear Jonathan Further to your email dated 2nd May 2007, in which you outlined the issues that were raised from my letter dated 1st May 2007, please note your contract states that your normal office hours are 9:00 -1730 Monday to Friday prevail. This means that you have to be working at this time in the office. It states that in order to allow you to undertake those duties you identify as necessary for detail and deadlines, you will be expected to apply your hours to cope as timings dictate in your position of responsibility. Overtime is not paid. This means that if you have appointments which would not warrant you coming into the office first, then you can go straight to your appointments from home. You state that you have not worked these hours for several years and when mentioned this has been dropped. I can assure you that the issue was not dropped and you have been informed on several occasions what the procedures are. Over the last month your attendance has got worse and now if you do attend the office, you are only here for two or three hours and this is not acceptable. After you had received our letter on the 1st May 2007 you ignored a management instruction to attend the office at 9am. You arrived at 10am and left at 12pm not returning for the rest of the afternoon and did not inform anybody you would not be in the office. Once again this is not acceptable and is also a Health and Safety issue. You told another member of staff that they could change desks with you because you will now be working from home and I would like to know who agreed this with you as I have no record. As Dennis has raised before, we are also concerned as your home computer does not have any of our systems installed and no work you are doing at home is being backed up and therefore there are risks that this may have. Also we do not have access to this work which should be available to the company. As you have clearly ignored an instruction to come into work at 9:00am we have no option than to take disciplinary action and will be in contact in due course to arrange. Yours sincerely Company Secretary Unity Media Plc Becket House, Vestry Road, Sevenoaks, Kent TN14 5EJ Tel: 01732 748000 Fax: 01732 748001Web: www.unity-media.com Registered in England No 1529U36 4th May 2007 Private and Confidential Dear Jonathan You are required to attend a disciplinary hearing to be held on Tuesday 8th May 2007 at 2.30pm in Dennis Taylor's office, Becket House. The purpose of the hearing is to allow you the opportunity to provide an explanation for the following matter of concern. Statement of grounds for commencing formal action Failure to fulfil the terms and conditions of employment regarding your hours of work and a reasonable management instruction given to you both verbally and in writing by the Chairman and Company Secretary. Further particulars being, without authorization you have elected to work from home even though it has been a requirement and an instruction for you to report into work each day at 9am unless you are attending a client visit. Throughout April you have been persistently late for work, details of the lateness are provided on the attached report. You have the right to be accompanied by a fellow employee of your choice or trade union official, and should you wish to exercise this right then, it is your responsibility to make the arrangements. You should be aware that the requirement for you to attend this disciplinary hearing in works time, during which time you will be paid, is deemed by the company to be a perfectly reasonable management instruction in line with our contractual disciplinary procedure. Hence, if you fail to attend without notification, or fail to attend without good reason, you are warned that this will be treated as potentially gross misconduct for failure to obey a reasonable management instruction. This in itself would then be the subject of a subsequent disciplinary hearing over and above the issues set out above in this letter. However, should you wish to contact any employee who you feel could assist you in preparing an explanation for the allegations made against you, then please contact me in order that arrangements can be made for them to be available for interview by the company. As you already have a Final Written Warning on your file, if you are unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for the matters outlined above, your employment may be terminated. If you have any queries regarding the contents of this letter please contact me.	My reply May 7, 2007. It is not reasonable to send a letter to me by email at 4:12 p.m. on Friday instructing me to attend a disciplinary meeting at 2.30 p.m. on the following Tuesday. I have formally informed you that I want to have a full time official of my union, the NUJ, present at any disciplinary hearing. I did not get your letter until it was too late on Friday to contact the NUJ so that a full time official can attend. Since there is an intervening Bank Holiday this effectively gives me no more than five and a half working hours to get an NUJ official to Sevenoaks. This is not enough time. When we spoke earlier on Friday I thought you agreed that I would be given several dates so that my union official could select one that s/he could attend. What changed? As I have told you before I am not failing to fulfil the terms and conditions of my employment because my contract says I determine when I do the work. This is the wording used in my contract: "Hours Normal office hours 0900 - 1730 Monday to Friday prevail. In order to allow you to undertake those duties you identify as necessary for detail and deadlines you will be expected to apply your hours to cope as timings dictate in your position of responsibility. Overtime is not paid." This sets no minimum period I must be in the office. It is obvious this means that the office routine is that reception and facilities in general are available 9-5.30 Monday to Friday. But I don't work those hours, I never have. Sometimes I work evenings, sometimes I work weekends. Editors have to work strange hours. You say the only flexibility allowed is that: "If you have appointments which would not warrant you coming into the office first, then you can go straight to your appointments from home." Next week, for example, I'm supposed to be in Italy for three days. How would not coming to the office first be sufficient to compensate me for working perhaps 70 hours at a stretch? Are you suggesting I should not come into the office for the next week or so? If I did that how would the magazine get produced? In your letter it says: "You state that you have not worked these hours for several years and when mentioned this has been dropped. I can assure you that the issue was not dropped and you have been informed on several occasions what the procedures are. Over the last month your attendance has got worse and now if you do attend the office, you are only here for two or three hours and this is not acceptable." But what I actually said was that on two occasions disciplinary action was started on this issue but when I pointed out what my contract said, no further action was taken (I was not given a formal warning). Yet I repeat I have never worked 9-5.30 on one single day in all the time I have been employed. I am not saying I have not worked these hours for several years, I am saying I have never worked them. You say it is a health and safety issue that I am not sitting in the office between 9 and 5.30. How could this suddenly have become a health and safety issue when I have never done it on a single day in the more than eight years I have worked for the company? Many of my colleagues spend almost as much time out of the office as I do, some (notably Mike Pinkney) more. How come it isn't a health and safety issue for them? You say that I told a colleague that he could change desks with me because I would not be coming into the office. This is false and I can prove it thanks to your diary of my attendance at the office. I said no such thing. I told Richard he could have whatever desk he liked so long as I continued to have access to my computer. The office continues to be my normal place of work and I will continue to need the computer. Finally you say you have no option but to take disciplinary action. Of course you have an option. The magazine is performing extremely well. I do my job in an exemplary fashion. All the relevant deadlines are always met. There is no crisis. However, if for any reason you need me to be in the office between 9 and 5.30 why not suggest an alteration to my contract. I would be delighted to talk to you about it. Jonathan Brind
INDEX Jonathan Brind	3rd May 2007