Carphone Warehouse blocks union website
Eats, shoots and leaflets
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Carphone Warehouse employees at the Irlam site were unable to get to their union website yesterday, as Carphoneworker.co.uk found itself on the list of unapproved sites for publishing information about forthcoming shift changes.
Only workers at the Irlam site were denied access to the site - the rest of the company could easily view shift change information that would not affect them. Carphone Warehouse told us the block was imposed due to "inaccurate information" being put up on the site, though that block has now been removed despite the fact that no changes have been made - indeed, the Union has had no official contact with the company about the matter.
Not that Carphone Warehouse appeared clear why the blockage was in place anyway. When the Reg first contacted the company we were told that the list was pretty random in that it blocked eBay but not Argos, and Tesco but not Sainsbury's; though those could just be snobbery on the part of those drawing up the list.
When pressed, CPW explained that the site contained inaccurate information, and that negotiations were underway to have the offending information edited so the block could be removed.
At this stage the block was indeed removed, but when we contacted the union we were told that they had heard nothing official from the company and that they had changed nothing more than a misspelling of "leaflets". Nevertheless, they were pleased the block was gone.
So we can only assume that Carphone Warehouse was acting to prevent this gratuitous error spreading before it got out of control. We applaud the company's zero-tolerance attitude to sloppy English and look forward to seeing blocks on any parts of the internet found to be using bad spelling or inaccurate punctuation - El Reg excepted of course. ®
COMMENTS
Who cares?
Unions are anachronistic.
Don't believe me, Union Card holder? Take this simple test:
What do you drive? What does your Union Boss drive? What does Management drive?
QED
@ Matthew Collier
The issue is not that the company is blocking websites, no one is complaining about that. The issue is that the ONE SINGLE website that was blocked was one set up by the Union to provide information and advise to CPW staff.
The company is in the middle of using made up information to introduce major changes to shifts. They are providing no information and they are going through a "Consultation Period" which involves them avoiding answering the questions asked and going through the motions. They are blocking all access to information and using very underhand tactics to try keep the staff in the dark.
A simple shift change really should have made it into The Register, but the way the management have treated the staff and the lies they are telling have caused this shit to happen.
@ Anon ^^ Its actually Carphone Whorehouse.
Spelling Mistake?
Possibly not a simple transposition error?
Craphone warehouse
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