Our People
Our people are key to our success. We need to invest in our employees and ensure we recruit, develop and retain the best people in the industry.
Each operating division has its own human resource management structure driven by the commitments in our Employment Policy. We endeavour to involve our employees in our business management. We have an employee director on our plc Board and on the boards of around 70% of our UK operating companies. We aim for employee representation via an employee director in all our UK companies.
Employee Rights
We're entirely committed to respecting human and employee rights in the workplace, we fully support the principles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. We respect the right of our employees to choose whether or not to join a trade union without influence or interference from management, and do not discriminate against any employee for engaging in union organising activities or otherwise supporting a union.
In the UK more than 90% of our workforce is unionised. We work in partnership with all major transport unions and via these partnerships have established our award-winning network of lifelong learning centres.
In North America, nearly 40% of our workforce is represented at a local level by one of more than 15 different trade unions. That is twice the US average for union representation in the transportation sector and far in excess of average private sector union density at around 7.4%. We fully support the rights of our North American employees to choose whether or not they wish to be members of unions and believe they should have the right to exercise that choice through a secret ballot to protect against intimidation or abuse. All union ballots in the United States are run independently by the National Labor Relations Board. In addition we employ two independent observers to witness the ballot and interview employees, ensuring that ballots are fair and free from management interference.
Equal Opportunity
First is an equal opportunity employer. In North America we have well-developed mechanisms for monitoring the diversity of the business. In the UK we are developing improved diversity measures and continue to explore new ways of realising equal opportunity. Through our relationship with Jobcentre Plus we encourage applications from those considered disadvantaged. We also support the UK Government's Able to Work project designed to widen recruitment opportunities for people with health problems and disabilities. In the UK we are represented on the Board of the National Centre for Diversity and a number of our bus companies are working towards the new Investors in Diversity standard. We hope to be one of the first large corporate employers to achieve the standard.
Training and Development
Training and development is a core part of our human resource strategy. We want to help employees to reach their full potential and believe that investing in them will provide direct business benefits. Each of our three operating divisions has its own varied (and often industry-leading) development programmes for everyone from apprentices to managing directors. In the UK our well-established network of award-winning workplace learning centres enables employees to develop their skills, interests and academic qualifications. More than 60% of our UK staff can access these centres.
Rewards and Recognition
We have a portfolio of schemes that recognise our employees' commitment to the company. It includes pensions, share ownership schemes, saving plans, access to credit unions, employee award schemes and bonus plans rewarding good performance. Existing or past employees comprise 57% of the names on the plc's shareholder register.
Further information about our people management strategy can be found by following the links below.