Fujitsu UK workers strike to protest job losses, attacks on pay and pensions
By
Robert Stevens
24 March 2017
Information technology workers employed at Fujitsu UK are striking today for 24 hours, in opposition to plans by the firm to carry out up to 1,800 redundancies.
The Unite union called the strike, with a further 24-hour stoppage set for March 27.
The job losses in the UK and Ireland—to be staggered over the next 12 to 18 months—are part of 3,300 redundancies planned throughout Europe in a restructuring operation. In 2013, Fujitsu already announced 5,000 job losses globally, with 3,000 of these in Japan. Last September, the firm said 400 jobs would go at its Finland operations. Then in November Fujitsu wrote to 2,500 of its UK staff telling them their jobs were at risk.
The Japanese-based transnational provides a range of services—from operating IT systems and supplying servers for public sector and private corporations, to providing air conditioning units. It employs 14,000 workers in Britain, with the redundancies representing around 15 percent of the workforce. Fujitsu has sites throughout the UK, including in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Wakefield, Edinburgh and Belfast. The UK redundancies would allow the firm “to streamline operations in order to remain competitive in the market,” said Fujitsu.
The development of cloud-based data storage facilities has hit the major IT conglomerates, with many clients shifting their data storage from big mainframe systems supplied by firms such as Fujitsu to remote servers. The Financial Times noted, “Fujitsu is facing competition from nimble start-ups and Amazon Web Services, which host data in giant centres far from company premises, as well as suffering a shift from desktop to mobile devices. A Fujitsu…