Two weeks after the devastating announcement that 48 of Rivus Fleet Solutions’ 56 garages will close once the company’s service and maintenance contract for BT and Openreach vehicles expires on September 29, well over 600 individuals are desperate for answers about their immediate employment future.

Yesterday (Tuesday) evening those questions came fast and furious at a special online mass meeting of the CWU’s beleaguered Rivus membership – but, extraordinarily, concrete answers are still in short supply for a workforce that remains unclear as to whether they will still have jobs in just over two months time.

Attended by virtually half of the union’s entire Rivus membership – a participation rate that far exceeds normal attendance levels for such meetings – the scale of membership anxiety over what the coming weeks have in store was plain for all to see.

While CWU national officer Allan Eldred did his utmost to field a plethora of highly pertinent questions thrown up by the yawning information gap over how normal TUPE and redundancy arrangements will apply in a highly unusual transfer of undertakings, the truth is that the union is itself urgently demanding clarity on just those issues.

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