AXA Union News

Harmonisation of AXA terms and conditions

Members will have, over the last few days, received a letter from the company concerning amendments to their terms and conditions of employment. These changes are part of the ongoing AXA UK Group harmonisation project and effect all employees in AXA Life, AXA Insurance and AXA Shared Services.

We have been actively involved in negotiations with the company over the last twelve months, with a two track agenda of trying to minimise the impact on members existing benefits, whilst seeking to harmonise upwards in areas where those benefits were lower than they should be. Obviously such negotiations involve some horse trading and there are bound to be some losers, as well as winners.

The approach we took on reducing any existing benefits for groups of staff was if they could not be maintained, to ascertain and compare their value and use compared to others. For example, at first glance staff employed in AXA Life prior to 1/10/2001 will be disappointed to see their 12 month full sick pay reduce to 6 months full, 6 months half. The reality of the situation was that only 3 staff have utilised this benefit in recent years and the reduction enabled us to get a major improvement in the sickness benefit for 1,600 post 1/10/2001 Life staff. Also, it should be noted, in the unlikely event that any illness exceeding 6 months, there still is managerial discretion to maintain full pay and we have seen this applied compassionately in AXA Insurance and Shared Services. We do appreciate that the 12 months offered peace of mind and we are committed to continue looking at this area and ensure staff suffer no real term disadvantage.

Despite the documentation you received there are still some areas under negotiation, including the redundancy terms for over 50's in Life and the Life 35 year service award for staff who have already completed 25 years. We will let you know the outcome of these negotiations in due course when they are completed.

There are some areas that have not been harmonised which we are unhappy about, primarily the provision of Private Medical Insurance to all staff reardless of operating company or grade and Overtime rates in AXA Life. However the company has agreed to revisit these areas in the 3rd quarter in negotiations with us.

Additionally we have been involved in a major project to harmonise the staff handbook. We have managed to make some substantial improvements in policy wordings to the benefit of staff eg. flexitime, sickness. Unfortunately there are still some areas we would like to see movement on and where harmonisation has not occurred (eg. paid time off for medical appointments which is policy in Insurance and Shared Services but not Life). We fully intend to revisit areas these over the remainder of 2007 and convince the stakeholders to adopt a one AXA approach that demonstrates the 'Trust' value promoted by Nicolas Moreau at the 'Preferred Company' events.

Overall we know that there are far more winners and losers in this exercise and we hope that those of you who have seen reductions in some areas, appreciate the process, the red-circling and banking of many old benefits and our continued commitment to improving your benefits as part of our ongoing work within AXA.

If you have any concerns about these changes please talk to your local workplace rep.

17th May 2007

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