John Lewis threatened with staff walkout over looming job cuts

John Lewis Staff

John Lewis bosses have been warned they risk sparking a staff walkout as workers demand answers over planned mass job cuts.

The partnership, which owns John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets, has been told it must urgently meet with union bosses to discuss its plans to slash 11,000 roles.

In a letter to John Lewis chairman Dame Sharon White, GMB said it was poised to ballot the retailer’s workers over strike action if she failed to provide more detail on the upcoming cuts.

GMB national officer Nadine Houghton said: “As the union that represents John Lewis workers, we call on you to meet urgently with us to discuss these changes and to give your workforce the meaningful representation they clearly need.

“If workers do not get the answers they feel they deserve, they will not hesitate to request that GMB begins a ballot of workers.”

Dame Sharon White has said ‘difficult decisions’ needed to be taken to protect the partnership’s future – Terry Murden/Alamy Stock Photo

This would be the first step towards a strike, with workers expected to first be asked whether they would be prepared to take industrial action over the issue to help the union gather views on how to progress.

Around 250 John Lewis Partnership workers are understood to be members of the GMB union.

A spokesman for John Lewis said: “We’ve just received the letter and will reply to the GMB.”

It comes as relations between the retailer and its staff become increasingly strained over upcoming job cuts, which many staff learned about in media reports.

Workers have been asking for more detail over the plans, including urging the partnership to publish recordings from an internal meeting last week where John Lewis’s executive director of finance Bérangère Michel provided some reasoning behind the worker changes.

John Lewis is yet to lay out the scale of upcoming cuts to all of its workers, although last week confirmed to staff that it would need to reduce its workforce.

Department heads were said to be working on plans to cut around 11,000 roles, equal to 10pc of its entire staff. Dame Sharon White and chief executive Nish Kankiwala said “difficult decisions” needed to be taken to protect the partnership’s future.

The planned cuts come after the partnership moved to slash redundancy payments in half in an effort to make job cuts more affordable. Staff responded to the update in internal forums to say they were planning to consult trade unions.

Dame Sharon late last month told employees to prepare for “quite big changes and quite bold changes”.

Staffing accounts for one of John Lewis’s biggest costs and in the last financial year, it spent £1.8bn in total on employees.

The growing threat of strike action follows criticism from union bosses last week over how the partnership has handled redundancy pay changes.

The GMB also accused John Lewis of discouraging workers from joining trade unions, something that was rejected by the partnership. It has its own partnership council, where staff elect representatives to vote on policy changes.

John Lewis said staff were “free to join a union”. A spokesman added that “as an employee-owned organisation, we… provide many benefits of a union, without any cost”.

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