AGM time for Health & Local Government SGE's‏

This week the newly elected service group executives in health and local government held their 2010 AGM's. In both service groups the progressive left chairing teams were re-elected and battle plans were developed to deal with the Con Dem threat to funding, jobs and services. Both services groups renewed their commitment to closer joint working to meet the challenges facing UNISON members in the main public services.

Local government
Chris Tansley from East Midlands and Margaret Clayton from Northern were elected as Chair and vice Chair respectively.

Redundancies - planned in Local Authorities over the next 3 months notified from Branches so far - England and Wales 15,500 Scotland 2,500.  UNISON has issued a freedom of information request to all Authorities and the results will be known around early September. In the first 3 months of this year 22,000 posts have been made redundant

Pay – the Tory controlled Employers in England and Wales continue to say that they will not meet to discuss pay and there is no offer on the table for 2010/11. There are further noises from the Con Dem Government that we will be facing a 3 year pay freeze in Local Government for a workforce who are already the lowest paid workers of all the public sector workers.

The Trade Union side are now lodging a dispute with the Employers over their refusal to discuss pay. In Scotland the members have rejected a 3 year ‘offer’ of 1.0%, 0%,and 0.5%. The Scottish Local Government Committee will now be deciding on the next steps.

The school support staff negotiating committee - the Con Dem Government has not responded to requests from UNISON to discuss whether they are still going ahead with the last Governments plans to introduce a separate negotiating body for school staff. As they plan to privatise large numbers of schools they are probably not interested in pursuing this.

UNISON is now considering whether to conduct a ballot of school staff members to see what action they’d like to take to achieve a separate negotiating body. Total Place and shared services are now being replaced with Place based budgets by the Con Dem Government. It may sound like nothing but it will herald a new era of mass privatisation of Local Authority services as they are moved towards greater commissioning of services. It will almost certainly lead to attacks on our members terms conditions and pay, chaos in service delivery and a two tier system where the more affluent get the services they can afford to pay for and the rest get a substandard service or none at all.

Pensions – it was reported that following the Government's appointment of former Minister John Hutton to look at how to attack public service pensions the Civil Service have been very protective of the Local Government pension scheme recognising that unlike the other schemes it is a funded scheme with separate investment arms and that Local Governments workers are low paid. Whether this will cut ant ice with this Con-Dem onslaught against public sector workers and services we will have to see but don’t hold your breath!

Health
Lilian Macer from Scotland was re-elected chair and George Barron, Northern and Roz Norman, East Midlands, were re-elected as vice chairs.

Debate focused on the NHS white paper 'Liberating the NHS'. It was agreed that a robust national campaign was necessary with an emphasis on local implementation. This could be end of NHS as we know it. We need to fight on national regional and local level and with other unions The Connect consultancy provided a scene setter on political campaigning and alliance building. The debate focused on organising in workplaces and building broader alliances