Employees working for a good company that actually cares and values its employees, not just says it does, will not have to resort to trades unions to be heard. Unfortunately many can not see that there is a fine line between hard but fair management and bullying. Its easy to push people rond when you can hide upstairs with your executive mates. But why is this going on....several contributors have said its make or break time for Briggs. The UK lift truck business is on its uppers, fact with too many players. This just means if you want to grow you have to do stupid deals and hope you make cash at the back end if the market picks up. Some gamble especially if you have been rebranding, investing and reorganising continuously. So If the squeeze is on from across the pond as suspected, simple maths tells you that will make the biggest saving quickly by taking a bit, (a lot to the individual, but small in terms of what is wanted), off a lot of people, i.e. the largest single group - engineers. If a few get fed up and leave, that saves on staff costs, enables you to employ cheaper and if the need arises to reduce numbers save on redundancy. Of course where the theory all goes wrong is if your engineers do leave in numbers or rebel. That just means you loose customers by bad service. Fact of life is that there are not many lift truck jobs about at the moment, but lift truck engineers have transferable skills so should look at other industries with common components for employment opportunities. If your skills are not valued where you are, the best punishment for the management is to take them somewhere else. Industrial action is morally justified and will punish but will probably only result in a few concessionary scraps being thrown down. Sorry to say it, but I dont see this ending quickly or happily, certainly for the lifeblood of the company - the engineers.