21 April 2002
A request: If you are
an "E-mail Buddy", please print this newsletter and give it to your
buddy.
This newsletter
is something of a special edition - it is predominantly an effort to locate
somebody with information that could help with the resolution of Dave
Mitchell's complaint. First the news, which is slight and only connected with
pensions in the sense that pensions are a special case of employee/employer
relations.
Here is a
snippet you may have missed: IBM is to
sell "services that improve companies' connections to their
employees".
IBM employees have already been
"benefiting", with the technology deployed to about 320,000 employees worldwide.
Dynamic
Workplaces, which consists of 2,000 IBM Global Services employees and about 300
IBM researchers, will use WebSphere Portal, Lotus Domino Extended Search, Lotus
Sametime, Quickplace, Tivoli SecureWay, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere
Application Server as the foundation for Web-based communication between
employers and employees.
With due respect to those fine products, it remains
to be seen how good a substitute they will make for the discussions between
staff, and the Open Door policy, which IBM employees used to enjoy.
There is news from the US about spin-offs from the
Enron affair. New regulations are
proposed to protect members of pension schemes. IBM is tightening its accounting practices and there is
discussion of whether this has contributed to the sharp fall in its share
price. As usual, an excellent place to
follow this is the weekly newsletter of our US colleagues: Weekly summaries of IBM-related clubs .
There is some strong rhetoric: "Enron
is not what happens when corporations break the law - it's what happens when
corporations make the law."
One small
victory for "the workers" is recorded.
IBM has been told that the folk who put big pro-union banners on their
cars were entitled to do so. The IBM
argument was not ostensibly anti-union; in effect they are argued that since
they could stop big signs in the carpark that said "This car for sale cheap"
they could extend that to any sign. A
US High Court has said otherwise.
The rest of
this newsletter is about a search for a missing document. If you have looked at Dave Mitchell's
complaint you will know about ../complaints/dmstage2.html
. If you scan that letter for
"therefor lately circulated" you will understand why Dave is keen to have a
copy of a particular 1957 document. Dave is looking for a copy of any document circulated to IBM UK employees
in 1956 or 1957 containing proposals for an employee pension plan. The document(s) shed(s) light on whether the
intent of the trust deeds in 1957 would have allowed for the possibility of
something like the M-plan being added without there being a separate sub-fund
for it. It is an extremely long shot
that you have a copy, but better to have tried and failed to find it than not
to have tried.
Even if you do
not have the actual document, anything about what the company could be expected
to put in the document, at that time, would be useful. For example, there is a 1966 policy
letter on full employment written by T.J. Watson Jr. that
would be helpful to somebody trying to assess what some missing 1966 document
would have said about employment. If,
by any chance, you have something similar about pensions then Dave would like a
copy.
We often end a newsletter with a legal point. Here it is just a reminder that a complaint
has to be timely:
(1) Subject
to paragraphs (2) and (3), the Pensions Ombudsman
shall not investigate a complaint or dispute if the act or omission which is
the subject thereof occurred more than three years before the date on which the
making of the complaint or the referral of the dispute is received by him in
writing.
(2) Where, at the date of its occurrence,
the authorised complainant was unaware of the act or omission referred to in
paragraph (1), the period of three years shall begin on the earliest date on
which he knew or ought reasonably to have known of its occurrence.
(3) Where it was not reasonably practicable
for a complaint or dispute to be made or referred before the end of the period
allowed under paragraph (1) or (2), the Pensions Ombudsman
may nonetheless investigate and determine such complaint or dispute if it is
made or referred within such further period as he considers reasonable.
Some of the events we are interested in go back to
1996 and before. So, theoretically at
least, it may not be possible to get them investigated now.
Yours sincerely
The C-Planners Group