Fox’s staff hold ballot

Batley's Fox's Biscuits factory. (d25101092)

Published on 20/09/2012 16:00

STAFF at Fox’s Biscuits are balloting for strike action over the company’s plans to change their working conditions.

Although staff at both the Batley and Kirkham factories have been balloted over the issue before, the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) feels strength of feeling has increased in recent weeks.

Fox’s owner, the 2 Sisters Food Group, wrote to staff in June, letting them know about changes they wanted to make to the terms and conditions of their employment. In return it will offer staff a three per cent pay increase.

It wants to reduce sick pay, redundancy pay and overtime pay. Bank holidays, excluding Christmas and New Year, would be taken as annual leave.

BFAWU’s branch secretary at the Wellington Street factory, Helena England, said: “Our members are absolutely fed up.

“We want to fight these changes, but a strike has to be a last resort. Sometimes we just have to make a stand.”

Mrs England said members felt their current contracts gave them benefits which would be taken away by the new terms and conditions.

“We’ve been through a lot in the last four years,” she added.

“We’ve given and given and they have taken and not given anything back.”

A 2 Sisters spokesman said: “We are aware of the ballot, however we remain in consultation and remain hopeful of securing a workable outcome. We have an attractive pay offer of three per cent on the table and we continue to go through the consultation process to ensure that we can remain competitive and for our sites to be viable for the future, in what is a tough biscuits market.

“We also note the significant numbers of employees who have expressed a willingness to accept these changes, however, whilst consultation is ongoing, it would be wrong to pre-empt specific changes.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Fox’s staff hold ballot

Top stories

News

Local