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Carphone Warehouse blocks union website
Eats, shoots and leaflets
Carphone Warehouse employees at the Irlam site were unable to get to their union website yesterday, as Carphoneworker.co.uk found itself on the list of unapproved sites for publishing information about forthcoming shift changes.
Only workers at the Irlam site were denied access to the site - the rest of the company could easily view shift change information that would not affect them. Carphone Warehouse told us the block was imposed due to "inaccurate information" being put up on the site, though that block has now been removed despite the fact that no changes have been made - indeed, the Union has had no official contact with the company about the matter.
Not that Carphone Warehouse appeared clear why the blockage was in place anyway. When the Reg first contacted the company we were told that the list was pretty random in that it blocked eBay but not Argos, and Tesco but not Sainsbury's; though those could just be snobbery on the part of those drawing up the list.
When pressed, CPW explained that the site contained inaccurate information, and that negotiations were underway to have the offending information edited so the block could be removed.
At this stage the block was indeed removed, but when we contacted the union we were told that they had heard nothing official from the company and that they had changed nothing more than a misspelling of "leaflets". Nevertheless, they were pleased the block was gone.
So we can only assume that Carphone Warehouse was acting to prevent this gratuitous error spreading before it got out of control. We applaud the company's zero-tolerance attitude to sloppy English and look forward to seeing blocks on any parts of the internet found to be using bad spelling or inaccurate punctuation - El Reg excepted of course. ®