Thousands of Barclays staff are demanding concessions from the bank after it said it wants employees to work from the office more often.
Staff who have been expected to work in the office two days a week should be in for at least three days a week from next month, according to the company. Unite, which represents about 36,000 Barclays staff, is calling for the bank to reverse the decision, and is also pressing for exemptions and a payment to offset increased travel and childcare costs.
Barclays said many employees already work in the office for three or more days, and that being on site fostered collaboration and helped people learn from each other. It added that it recognised "the benefits of balancing flexibility for colleagues with the importance of working together in our physical locations".
The bank sent a memo to staff in July outlining its expectations, which include that senior leaders work at least four days a week in the office. The proposed rules change was first reported by the Financial Times.
Unite national officer Rick Coyle said thousands of employees have signed an open letter calling for Barclays to reverse the decision, and that the number of signatories "continues to rise". He added that the bank is "trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist" in making its working-from-home rules less flexible.
The open letter says workers are delivering "strong financial results and improved customer services" under the current policy. Thousands of workers have made suggestions, which the union has condensed into a series of demands.
Those demands include an exemption for people whose commutes are longer than 40 minutes or 35 miles; exemptions during Christmas, summer and school holidays; a maximum of one day in the office for carers; flexibility for wrap-around childcare, with childcare vouchers and on-site creches to be explored; and a one-off payment to offset costs.
"Our minimum time in office requirements vary by business area, reflecting the nature of the work and the needs of the business," a spokesperson for the bank said. Barclays declined to say how many staff would be affected by the rule change, though the BBC understands requirements differ by team, with investment bankers, for example, in the office five days a week.
The dispute is a familiar one. Large organisations including Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan brought in policies requiring head office staff to attend every day after the pandemic, and in June the digital bank Revolut said it was moving away from its remote-first policy for new recruits in 2027.
The first of the union's demands, however, does something the others do not. It defines a unit.
An exemption for commutes longer than "40 minutes or 35 miles" treats the two thresholds as equivalent. Thirty-five miles in forty minutes is 52.5 miles per hour. Britain now has, for the first time, an officially negotiated commuting speed, and it has been set by a bank and a trade union rather than by the Department for Transport.
Consider two employees. One travels 34 miles in 41 minutes, an average of 49.8mph. The other travels 36 miles in 39 minutes, an average of 55.4mph. The first has produced the commute the threshold is written for. The second has produced a faster road. Once the two limits are read as a single equivalence, the determining factor is not distance, and it is not time. It is velocity.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that this creates the first commuting policy in which improving your journey is a financial penalty. An employee who moves closer to the office, or who takes a faster train, crosses the threshold in the wrong direction and forfeits the exemption. The rational response is to slow down.
The bank's position is that its requirements should reflect "the nature of the work and the needs of the business". The union's position now also reflects the average speed of the road network. Under the proposal as drafted, the surest way to secure an exemption is for the traffic to deteriorate. Nobody has asked for that yet.