TATA Steel Agreement and RM Pension Proposal

[fishtank]

51% gives the RM employees a controlling interest. The unions role would be moot. But being as said RM employees (I'm loathe to say "we") only have 11% the whole topic is moot IMO

Of course, where the unions role is not moot, is in promoting unity and galvanising the stregth amongst RM employees collectively, whatever their individual shareholdings.

You're not really getting this.
RM employees are individual shareholders, they act as individual shareholders and vote as individual shareholders, In order to have a controlling interest or even use the power of the 11% they would need to pool their shares into a collective pot and appoint an individual or group to act on their behalf.

That's real pie in the sky stuff.

As it stands they are 100,000+ tiny minority shareholders.

[jetblack]

You're not really getting this.

You are being a little bit contrary FT . Individual shareholders with common interests vote together all the time. It matters not what organisation represent them, if any. And if, collectively, they command a majority of votes cast, their will carries the day.

It might also be the case that a controlling shareholding can be attained with less than 50% (where there is division or apathy amongst the rest of the shareholders).

But with a shareholding of 11% ? Forget it.

[yellowbelly]

Well, the shareholder vote is there for people to use, if they don't that's up to them, just thought I'd throw it out there
as lots of people seem not to know they can vote as shareholders.

Let's hope the same people who won't bother using their shareholder vote do use their CWU vote
when it becomes necessary!

[fishtank]

The problem yellowbelly and this is the point I was trying to make to jet is that we can't speak collectively for the shareholders whether they're employees or not.

Some are union members, some are not, some will be right wing and some left wing , some work for parcelforce, I dare say their priorities might be different, about 10-15,000 are managers not even represented by the CWU, some are engineers, professional drivers, planners, HR, customer service and even the idiots that come up with world class mail and other such nonsense.

The point I'm trying to make is that using the shares as a voice is a dead end because clearly we don't all sing the same song, it would be impossible to organise that song and we don't have any right to tell them what song to sing because these shares are held by the individual not some socialist collective.

[nataddick]

Fish - I agree. When RM was privatised the CWU talked about trying to galvanise support from the collective membership using a 'block CWU vote' but it has since disappeared off the agenda into a 'black hole' and I suspect that this is for the reasons you have already outlined.

Just found a link to the above :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... ation.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;