Engineers at maintenance contractor Romec voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike yesterday after bosses U-turned on a collective agreement on redundancy terms.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) welcomed the decision, which saw 94 per cent of employees voting for industrial action.

CWU national officer Ray Ellis said the companies attempts to "wash its hands" of long-serving employees was "cynica|" and "disgraceful."

Romec provides services for Royal Mail and several commercial customers, however at the end of last year some of these contracts were terminated.

They then attempted to move employees onto contracts with the company's Romec had finished working with.

In this way the employees could be made redundant at a lower cost to Romec, according to the CWU.

Despite being largely defeated by the union the CWU said the terminated contracts created a surplus of around 140 engineers at the company.

Now the union is insisting that Romec has backtracked on a collective agreement on redundancy terms. Rather than adhering to the longstanding Managing Surplus Agreement (MSA) made in 2002, it's trying to impose statutory redundancy conditions on personnel employed at the company after 2007.

CWU national officer, Ray Ellis said: "Romec has refused to honour its obligation to its employees and is now riding roughshod over employees' job security. I fully support the engineers who want to take a stand over these attacks and hold Romec to the agreements it has made with the union. The company's behaviour defies belief.

"Romec unilaterally decided to allocate employees to artificially constructed duties to enable them to be transferred out against their will or face being treated as having voluntarily resigned without compensation.

"The MSA is the key agreement protecting our Romec members' job security and Romec's cynical attempts to bypass it show callous disregard to those employees directly affected and represent a threat to every Romec member."

The earliest that strike action could take place would be February 3. Despite repeated attempts by the Morning Star to contact Romec, there was no-one available to comment.