Employees urge charity to consider using donations to fund jobs as management say job losses are unavoidable

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Staff at Amnesty International are to vote on whether to strike over a dispute about redundancies.

The trade union Unite will ballot its 300 members at the human rights organisation next week.

In June, Amnesty announced it was planning to cut 146 posts, which would result in 93 job losses, after admitting a £17m hole in its budget to the end of 2020.

A number of voluntary redundancies and a recruitment freeze since 2018 have reduced the number of job losses to 20, said the organisation, adding that it was confident cuts could be reduced further through redeployment.

The news follows a difficult period at the organisation. An independent report in February this year described its workplace as “toxic”.

Amnesty said the union’s course of action was disappointing.

Unite believes the proposed cuts will “greatly reduce” the charity’s ability to deliver critical human rights work, and will result in the loss of expertise.

The union said it had no option but to ballot its members, given management’s refusal to consider using donations to keep people in work, rather than using them to boost reserves. The organisation has 755 staff.

Alan Scott, Unite’s regional co-ordinating officer, said: “Unite has exhausted all the available dispute resolution options open to it, including meetings at the conciliation service Acas.

“Unfortunately, Amnesty’s management has refused to countenance reducing the amount of money being pumped into reserves in order to save jobs, and therefore members felt they had no option but to ballot for industrial action.

“Amnesty’s management can still have the opportunity to prevent industrial action by tabling proposals that redundancies will be avoided by using a fraction of its reserves.”

Unite said the redundancies were a direct result of overspending by the senior management team.

A spokesman for Amnesty said: “It is disappointing that Unite has decided to ballot its members employed by Amnesty International for industrial action. However, we fully recognise and support Amnesty International employees’ right to strike.

“We are very grateful to everyone who has engaged constructively with the consultation and enabled us to reduce the number of redundancies. Nonetheless, this provides little solace to those at risk of losing their jobs.

“We deeply regret that these redundancies have been made necessary due to harsh financial realities and the need to put the secretariat on to a more stable footing for the future. This is a painful and difficult decision, and we will do everything in our power to support impacted staff.

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“Regrettably, we do not have the option to further reduce the level of reserve as it is at the absolute minimum to ensure the fiscal future of the organisation.”

One insider at Amnesty said the threatened redundancies were the “final straw” for many staff at the organisation, who feel they have been treated badly.

“We’ve had damning wellbeing reports one after another. But the way they are conducting the consultation, we feel no lessons have been learned,” another source said.

The crisis at Amnesty emerged last year when Gaëtan Mootoo, 65, a senior researcher, killed himself at his Paris office, leaving a note blaming work pressures and a lack of support from management. His death was followed by several reviews. One, conducted by James Laddie QC, found that “a serious failure of management” had contributed to Mootoo’s death.

A subsequent independent review of workplace culture found a “state of emergency” at the organisation after a restructuring process.