Following the rejection of AXA’s pay offer for staff in Northern Ireland in the recent pay ballot we re-engaged with management to try and come up with a proposition that our members would find acceptable.

Feedback from you overwhelmingly focused on the inequities in terms and conditions, especially those in the Derry Service Centre and the rest of Northern Ireland. Whilst the company had indicated a willingness to engage on this later in the year, it was clear to us that you wanted to see some progress now.

After further negotiations with AXA yesterday, we are pleased to advise that they have agreed to the following as part of their 2019 pay offer:

1. Under the company sick pay scheme, absence will now be paid at full pay once length of service requirements have been completed. This means that the first three days will no longer be unpaid nor days four and five only paid at the statutory sick pay rate.
2. Terms and conditions review negotiations for Northern Ireland will commence in October of this year.

Unite in AXA are pleased with the improvements that have been offered as this will have an immediate benefit for a large number of members and feel that, combined with the increased pay spend in Northern Ireland of 3%, this revised offer is one we can recommend to members to accept as the best that can be achieved through negotiation.

Unite will ballot members across Northern Ireland the week commencing 3^rdJune 2019.

The result of the 2019 Northern Ireland pay ballot is as follows:

For: 37%
Against: 63%
Spoilt: 0%

We have communicated the result to the company and are now looking to re-engage with them.

Thank you to everyone who voted and the local workplace reps for the hard work they put in running the ballot.

Earlier in the year we raised the issue of banked legacy redundancy times for employees originally employed by Prospero that were worse than the harmonised redundancy terms with the company. The effect of this is that members of this population could, on average, receive £7000 less redundancy pay than if it all been calculated on current AXA terms.

We are pleased to advise that after negotiations, AXA Insurance have agreed to remove any banking that is worse than the harmonised than the current terms, so over one hundred members of staff who initially started work for Prospero or Sims have had their redundancy pay terms improved by several thousand pounds in the unfortunate case that they are made redundant.