Visteon Pensioners and The Tour de Farce

From the blog title above you might be able to guess that Other Half is a bicycling fan and his TV seat in the house is echoing with excited cheers, especially today when Mark Cavendish retained the green jersey in today's stage of the Tour de France.

The Tour*

But that doesn't mean that I am taking my eye off the ball of other news and today's Professional Pension magazine had a really enjoyable article by Jack Jones about the latest in the Visteon Pensioner's legal struggle for justice. I found the article really interesting because it explained how the legal representatives of Ford and the Unite union have met with a High Court Judge this week to set the length and probable date of the hearing of the Unite claim

which alleges:

Ford provided misleading information to its employees when it spun off car parts manufacturer Visteon in 2000.

Again, quoting the article, Unite's case is:

The claim alleges Ford made misleading statements to employees over the security of the Visteon scheme and failed to state there was any risk involved in transferring accrued rights.

The whole article makes fascinating reading and must give the Visteon pensioners a real filip to their campaigning even though they will have to wait until the end of next year before the court case takes place.

*[French n. "tower, rook, castle; run, tour, circuit; ride, walk; twist, whirl, turn; stroll, wander; round, rotation; revolution; lathe, tool which is used to cut and shape (wood, metal, etc.)" Used here in the sense of 'revolution'. OK so that's a pun, and a bad one, but it is not easy making a pun in a foreign language. E.]

The Farce

One of the pensioners told me a funny story yesterday. Several members of VPAG joined the 'Alan Mulally fan page' on facebook last year. Mr Mulally is the CEO and President of Ford and when he was in the UK last September he avoided questions from the CBI [whom he was addressing] and snuck in the back way to the flagship Ford Engineering and Research Centre at Dunton, Essex to avoid the Visteon Pensioners who were demonstrating at the main entrance. [Clicking on the link will more!]

Anyway, thinking that perhaps Mr Mulally had not been told about the Visteon UK Pension Problem [rather like Rupert Murdoch and the 'phone hacking problems in his empire] some of the ever helpful pensioners decided to join his facebook page and give him lots of useful information including links, photographs, videos and even a specially composed campaign song. All the information was completely true and legally checked. And oddly, instead of being grateful for all this help, Mr Mulally is now refusing to take messages on his 'wall' from these excellent sources and seems to have deleted all their information too. Still since they have been doing this for about eight months perhaps he feels confident enough now that he knows enough already to answer questions?

The picture above is of VPAG members demonstrating outside Parliament whilst Ford representatives answered questions put by MPs and AMs inside. Let's hope that the Ford representatives realised how important it was to tell the truth, as James Murdoch is alleged today to have misled MPs on Tuesday and Scotland Yard are reported to be investigating.