Case study - 22 August, 2017

John shares the bakers’ recipe for success

The bakers’ union BFAWU is overcoming the obstacles facing the 21st century food industry to help people progress throughout the sector.

John Vickers, who manages bakers’ union BFAWU Learning Services, has been involved with union learning and training for more than four decades since he first joined the union as a young man.

A student of the TUC Postal Courses Centre that once made Tillicoultry in Falkirk famous (where he gained an advanced qualification in arithmetic and statistics), John had also written shop stewards’ courses for the union long before he took over as project manager six years ago.

John said;

I’ve always had the view that as we need to help people, we need to have a decent understanding of what their problems are and a knowledge of techniques we can use to our best advantage to help us to help them,” he says.

For John’s colleagues in the food industry, the problems are clear. First, many of them leave school with few or no qualifications because they don’t receive the right kind of support – and that has the knock-on effect of badly denting their confidence when it comes to personal and professional development.

Second, the vast majority work for companies that have cut staffing levels to the bone, with some firms forced to agree business on a break-even basis just to keep the production lines rolling, which creates huge obstacles to successful workplace learning.

And third, a significant proportion of food workers are migrants who don’t have the kind of language skills they need to cover all aspects of their job, let alone to exercise their employment rights.

But John and his team of dedicated project workers are working hard to overcome all these obstacles, helping food workers (not only union members) update their skills and gain new qualifications, often the first they have ever achieved.

Back in the spring, for example, the BFAWU Learning Services attended a celebration day at Manor Bakeries in Stoke-on-Trent, in the company of General Secretary Ronnie Draper, a long-time supporter of the union learning agenda himself.

And in addition to congratulating learners who had completed English, maths and IT courses, the union team signed a learning agreement with the company, which is part of the giant Premier Foods operation.

At the Fox’s Biscuits factory in Batley, West Yorkshire, the union recently ran a well-attended two-day relaunch of the on-site learning centre featuring representatives from the company, including the Fox’s training manager, union learning reps and full-time officers from BFAWU and tutors from Chesterfield College.

BFAWU Project Workers Lisa Greenfield and Louise Bennett have also run a series of skills awareness days, using the union’s Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) app loaded on their iPads to encourage more than 50 workers to complete a short survey to identify what they were interested in learning.

Both initiatives have been fully supported by management at the company, which is part of the 2 Sisters Food Group, the Birmingham-based business that supplies the big four supermarkets Asda, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, as well as the discounters Aldi and Lidl and the upmarket Waitrose.

At Sheffield-based Pennine Foods, which is also part of 2 Sisters Food Group, the union is offering English, maths and IT courses to workers through its partnership with Dearne Valley College.

To accommodate the needs of the shiftworkers at the factory, Dearne Valley College tutors run workshop sessions that people can drop into either before or after their shifts, while the HR manager on-site has played a positive role in ensuring managers understand when workers have to be released to take part in learning opportunities.

The union has also been offering English courses to colleagues at the Hovis factory in Nottinghamshire, in collaboration with tutors from Leicester College.

The Learning Services team took advantage of the union’s annual conference this summer to offer more help to delegates, delivering 119 English assessments, 111 maths assessments and 104 ICT assessments, as well as helping members complete 200 learning needs analyses.

John explains;

As far as the union is concerned, we are exceptionally well thought of at every level: by conference, which is the ruling body, by both the general secretary Ronnie Draper and the president Ian Hodson, and by the national executive council (I give them quarterly reports about everything we’re doing),”

In addition to all of this, there is much more in the works, including a potential series of equality and diversity courses for staff at Gregg’s, the high street baker that employs 26,000 people (some Gregg’s staff are already enrolling on distance learning courses through Leicester College), plus more learning opportunities thanks to a recently signed union recognition agreement with a major European food company.

John said;