Monday 6 June 2011

Report of the Atos Recruitment Evening Picket Glasgow




Over a period of 2 1/2 hours on Monday 6th June around 50 people joined the picket, called by the Crutch Collective and Black Triangle, of the Atos Recruitment Evening in Glasgow. Some had travelled from Edinburgh and as far away as Berwick. Some officials of the PCS union were able to attend at the start and took away some leaflets. The admin. staff at Atos are members of PCS.

The police were present from early on and stopped people from blocking the doors. With a couple of exceptions most of the 20 or so doctors and nurses going into the Recruitment Evening ignored the request not to take jobs with Atos. This was despite being told of the people with cancer and terminal illnesses having their benefits cut by Atos and the suicides caused by the stress of the relentless and constant reassessment by Atos. They were also given leaflets detailing the fatal consequences of benefit changes as documented by several mental health charities. The leaflet also quoted a former Atos employee in Scotland who quit, because the medical assessments are designed to catch out disabled people.

A nurse heckled those inside through a megaphone. The leaflet was read out through the megaphone to the doctors and nurses waiting in the lobby and at the presentation.

John McArdle of Black Triangle spoke to the crowd of the need to keep the campaign going until the medical assessments are carried out by a public body again. Plans were made for the next demo. A representative from Citizens United, another direct action orientated anti-cuts group in Glasgow expressed their desire to work with us in the future.

We got a clearer idea of the future some of us face as we chatted to some homeless people waiting for the Salvation Army food van who had also had their disability benefits cut despite having serious physical and mental health problems.

A handful of the doctors and nurses who attended the Recruitment Evening were escorted by the police through the crowd when they left by the main entrance. Debates were held about whether we should call them scabs or not. The rest had to sneak out via the staff exit like rats. No one was arrested and we were able to make our presence felt for the whole of the event. We are getting substantially bigger. We see the picket as a victory. Atos now know that any future recruitment evenings will need extra security and the presence of the police. The doctors and nurses who chose to forget their medical ethics and any social conscience had to endure the most unpleasant environment possible. The myth of the Atos PR about the ease and convenience of the Atos professional employee lifestyle has been destroyed.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and helped promote the picket.

2 comments:

  1. Maybe we need to 'up the anti' and ensure that ATOS Origins employees, require escorting from their buildings, every working day of their lives?

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  2. Important for use in fighting Atos, both in appeal cases and over the consequences of what they do. Nobody has ever offered a reasoned refutatiion that this "court change" is real, the logic for it holds up sentence by sentence, don't be another campaign that ignores it and helps it stay covered up.

    THE COURT CHANGE: Since 7 July 1999 all court or other legal decisions are open-endedly faultable on their logic, instead of final. "Open to open-ended fault finding by any party".

    Its shifting of power in favour of ordinary people ensures that it has been under a media silence. Still, it is on publicly traceable record through petitions 730/99 in the European, PE6 and PE360 in the Scottish, parliaments.

    This follows from my European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98 on a scandal of insurance policies requiring evictions of unemployed people from hotels. This case referred to violation of civil status from 13 May 1997, yet the admissibility decision claimed the last stage of decision taken within Britain was on 4 Aug 1995. ECHR has made itself illegal, by issuing a syntactically contradictory nonsense decision that reverses the physics of time, and calling it final. This violates every precedent that ECHR member countries' laws recognise the chronology of cause and effect, in court evidence.

    Hence, the original ECHR is now, and since then, an illegal entity, because it broke all preexisting precedent that courts recognise the correct order of time, and it claimed a power of finality to issue decisions whose content is a factual impossibility. But for the original ECHR to lapse in this way, also breaches the European Convention's section on requiring an ECHR to exist. Hence, this section requires the member countries to create a new ECHR that removes the original's illegality. The source of the illegality being left standing was in the claimed power of final decision. Hence, the only way the new court can remove the illegality is by being constituted such that its decisions are not final. If decisions are not final, the only other thing they can be is open-endedly faultable.

    This requires the courts in the member countries to be compatible with open-ended decisions and with doing in-country work connected to them. Hence, legal decisions within the member countries' courts also cease to be final and become open-ended, in all the Council of Europe countries.

    The concept of "leave to appeal" is abolished and judges no longer have to be crawled to as authority figures. Every party in a case is automatically entitled to lodge a fault finding against any decision, stating reasons. These are further faultable in return, including by the original fault finder, stating reasons. A case reaches its outcome when all fault findings have been answered or accepted.

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