As a customer of Coop (Bank and CIS), I've done my bit and complained through the annual customer survey.

Nation wide IT strike, could get some chrimbo shopping in.

Just popped over to the CFS website. Under "Our values" they list:

Social Responsibility - We are committed to leading the way on ethical, environmental and community issues.

You'd think this dispute could be defined as a communitiy issue.

So to "save" 31 jobs from going to other countries, 90-odd people are refusing to work. What possible outcomes can we see:

1.) T' management will cave and say "yes, you were right. Making our lives difficult, undermining the UK operations record on reliability has made us willing to keep these people on".

2.) The overseas operations will whisper in the boss' ears and say "they're all troublemakers, close the whole lot. We can pick up the extra work"

3.) The company will see the effect of not having the 90 strikers working and decide they don't need any of them

4.) A miracle will happen, the 31 jobs won't be "offshored" and the company will decide to move more work to the UK

Now, outsourcing is generally an admission that someone else can run your (IT) operation batter then you can. It's also a rather naive view that you'll still get all the tacit work done, that really helped the business run properly. However, I can't help thinking that we went through all this sort of unrest and poor judgement a generation ago - maybe there are some things that need relearning?

I would have thought that the low turnout of the strike ballot was a result of people being shit scared of rocking the boat and getting the boot before christmas.

Shitty situation, i would hope that they have started looking for work to get out of that morale-raping environment ASAP, rather than rely on a strike changing the minds of managers who only see them as numbers on a spreadsheet.

"Now, outsourcing is generally an admission that someone else can run your (IT) operation batter then you can."

Surely you mean:

"Now, outsourcing is generally an admission that someone else can run your (IT) operation cheaper than you can."

Actually outsourcing is a recognition that some one else can run your IT cheaper than you, quality of service does not come in to it. Often this is achieved by the outsource company's staff trying to pretend they are dedicated resources to each of their multiple clients. The actual technical ability of these people tends to be higher than people expect, they are just over-worked, however there, as any where, are also useless people performing the same roles.

I should know, I worked for one of Europe's largest outsourcing companies for 5 years. Saw some very good techies, some very bad ones, and management trying to maximise employee work loads while BSing their clients.

Aye, let's see how much money Steria make when there are no IT workers in an IT company.

The management get paid the big bucks, they should be able to manage the work of TEN Ordinary replaceable worker bees, shouldn't they?

As the earlier linked article says, the Coop FS IT department was passed on to Steria in 2007, a fairly common occurence.

Wasn't there a requirement at that time for ex-employees be maintained at equivalent salary for a few years? If not, Co-Op FS didn't do a great job at handover time.

"John Torrie, CEO of Steria UK, said the vote was not a strong call to action"

Yeah, it's only an 80% "yes" vote. How strong do they need?

I'm all for them going on strike. I wish people in the US would get a backbone about this (well, in Las Vegas they have -- the IT guys are part of the "service workers" union along with the hookers and pole dancers. For real.) These companies that outsource everything are just going to shoot themselves in the foot.. several in the US, they outsourced everything. Guess what? The company is then just some CEO and executives telling outsourced guys what to do -- eventually the outsourcer realises they can sell the same service direct, and the company that did the outsourcing is done for. A strike will just get them to either tone down the outsourcing, or just get rid of these companies a little faster (when they don't have enough workers to get any work done.) Which I'm all for.

With a Dick saying things like "We believe that this export of jobs is unacceptable in the current climate" it'll never work.

Can't he see that it is precisely the "current climate" that encourages companies to offshore jobs?

"The low turn out for the ballot combined with the fact that just 65 people out of a membership in excess of 175 voted to support action, highlights that the appetite for industrial action goes against the wishes of the vast majority of members."

One wonders what percentage of shareholders actually vote. I've never seen a shareholder ballot form which stated that your not voting would automatically be counted as not being in favour of the recommendations put forward.

I always return these ballots with the exact opposite of whatever is recommended. I know my personal protest will be drowned out by the big corporate shareholders.

Isn't that, like, dangerous?

Anyway, if it's a bank, it's easy to get its attention. If enough account holders get organized, they can just do a big enough "bank run" to make them notice. Just go and cancel your account, stating your reasons; if enough people do it, they'll deprive Co-op of enough money to actually matter about the thing.