Civil Service Pension Scheme administrator MyCSP is planning to run a poll to ask staff whether they want a recognised trade union, according to the PCS union.
This comes as PCS members at the pension scheme administrator enter a seventh week of strike action in search of formal recognition for the union ahead of the transfer of staff to outsourcing giant Capita on 1 December.
PCS said MyCSP’s chief executive, Duncan Watson, has suggested that the company runs its own “simple and anonymous poll” to ask staff whether they want a recognised union.
The MyCSP chief exec said he “expects” PCS members to “respect the outcome” of the proposed poll, PCS added.
But PCS said it is unconvinced that the ballot will be organised impartially. It said "a real recognition ballot would need to have genuine oversight, where the union would have the opportunity to meet with all staff and explain the benefits of having a properly unionised workplace".
In a letter to Watson sent on 15 August, Martin Kelsey, a national officer at PCS, quoted an email from Watson three days earlier as saying: "We have decided that it is appropriate to ask all MyCSP employee partners to share their views on recognition by way of a simple and anonymous poll.
"We have reached this decision for two reasons, firstly MyCSP Limited is part-owned by its employee partners who have a right to express an opinion on how our business is run, and secondly recognition will impact all employee partners not just PCS members."
MyCSP is 75% owned by the pensions division of private sector provider Equiniti, with the remaining 25% owned by a trust of the administrator's staff – or employee partners.
Kelsey said in his letter that “there are no circumstances” where its members “would view a ‘cold-calling plebiscite’ – informally organised by a company which is, by now, well on the road to establishing itself as an anti-union employer – as having anything remotely close to the democratic legitimacy of our position”.
Kelysey said the planned poll appears to be "nothing more than an extremely stripped-down version of a statutory recognition ballot; except of course, the statutory process would have had proper oversight, and would allow unions complete access to the all the staff, giving us the opportunity to explain the benefits of union recognition, and crucially would need to be conducted over a reasonable period of time – something which, by your own assertion, the proximity of the transfer (not to mention the TUPE process itself) would preclude".
He added that PCS remains committed to finding a solution to the dispute.
PCS members at MyCSP have been striking since the beginning of July in an effort to secure union recognition and ensure that PCS is fully involved in the TUPE talks to protect their existing terms and conditions ahead of the transfer of the pension scheme contract.
The initial round of strikes, affecting offices in Liverpool and Cheadle Hulme, began on 7 July and were due to end next Friday, 15 August, but were earlier this month extended by a further six weeks.
Equiniti has been approached for comment.