Civil-service representatives say staff are furious that the department has asked contractors to express their interest in a range of cleaning and maintenance operations across the Island – including cleaning public toilets and multi-storey car parks and maintaining school grounds – so soon after a redundancy mitigation consultation with public-sector staff currently employed in those areas had begun.
Nick Corbel, Unite the Union’s regional representative, said ballot action could now be sped up, as the department had jumped the gun and proven it had been working on privatisation plans behind workers’ backs.
However, John Rogers, Infrastructure’s chief officer, defended the move, saying that the department needed to assess the level of interest in the contracts at the same time as working on redundancy mitigation plans with unions in order to meet deadlines and work as efficiently as possible.
