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By John Oates, 15 November 1999 00:30

NEWS BT is facing its first strike since the mid-80s after up to 4,000 Communications Workers Union members voted overwhelmingly for industrial action. Unless agreement is reached, the first of the scheduled days of action will be on the 22 November - a week today. Workers at 37 call centres for 150 and 151 calls are taking the action in protest at what they describe as "management style borrowed from the previous century". Peter Earl, secretary of the clerical branch at the Communications Workers Union said: "We are unhappy with increasing use of agency staff, increasingly oppressive management techniques, unprecedented levels of monitoring and the setting of arbitrary performance targets." He added that staff were trained to deal professionally with the public and that was becoming impossible. When asked on the likelihood of the dispute being settled before the strike day he replied: "I'm not banking on it." A spokeswoman for BT said: "We concede that pressures of work have increased over the last few months at these centres but we have taken on 1,800 new members to help alleviate this." She also said both staff and managers were being offered training and BT was ensuring that time was set aside for it. The company is also discussing attendance and shift times with staff. She stressed that the telco would continue to talk to the union to try and find a resolution to the dispute.