Local Government Pay Campaign - What a Shambles

 

'Gizza Job' - the famous words of Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff rang true for so many in 1980s Thatcher’s Britain. Joblessness and unemployment rife and job insecurity endemic as workers were treated as collateral damage in the monetarist reshaping of the economy.

Fast forward to the 2020s and for many those issues of job insecurity and risk of unemployment has not gone away. The difference now is the claim that there are jobs aplenty for anyone who wants one. Of course, this analysis fails to take into account the issues of under-employment, the mismatch of skills to the jobs market and the flagrant attempts by employers to avoid obligations to their workers; instead, the gig economy is alive and kicking without any semblance of contractual obligations to workers.

"The paltry 1.75% pay increase for local government was highly predictable. A lesson not yet learned is that rhetoric within the walls of UNISON HQ and the parallel universe of the ultra left will not solve the pay crisis"

The results of these changes can now be seen in the volume of worker movements, exacerbated by the pandemic, many are leaping to the next job seeking better pay to compensate for their otherwise poor conditions of employment. This can only be described as a jobs crisis. But it is not limited to the private sector.

Within the public sector it looks like a pay ‘rise’ of 1.75% will land on council workers. This is against the context of a reported shortage of around 170,000 – 190,000 care workers, with 105,000 in England alone. 

UNISON GS nails Radio 4's Any Questions

 

Last weekend UNISON General Secretary Christina McAnea made a strong debut on BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' panel discussion. The programme focused on the upcoming budget with Christina contributing well received answers on NHS funding, social care, public sector pay and levelling up. Listen here:

Any Questions? - Dr Rosena Allin-Khan MP, Christina McAnea, Nick Timothy, Nadhim Zahawi MP - BBC Sounds

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0010nv1

Pay - doing nothing is not an option

On Thursday a national pay summit was held at UNISON head office with representatives in attendance from all regions and service groups. Co-chaired by President Wendy Nichols and NEC Policy Chair Jane Carolan, the seminar was opened by General Secretary Dave Prentis who set out a context of Government long term 1% pay restraint, relentless public services cuts, vicious attacks on tax credits and the huge threat posed by the Trade Union Bill. https://www.unison.org.uk/news/article/2015/09/special-unison-summit-plans-to-tackle-pay-freeze/

In a speech outlining the challenges facing UNISON branches and members in local government, SGE Chair Glen Williams posed the big question to delegates - 'Does anyone here think doing nothing is an option in terms of a pay campaign?' With national pay disputes progressing in further education and probation, the local government NJC claim recently submitted as well as an all member consultation on a 2.5% two year offer in Scotland, that question will be answered soon enough (full speech below).

Why TTIP is bad for workers

#NoTTIP The recent War on Want Manchester conference - ‘TTIP: Building the Fightback’ - included a presentation by Jeronim Capaldo of TUFTS University in the USA. Capaldo’s study, ‘The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: European Disintegration, Unemployment and Instability’, provides conclusive evidence that contrary to official assessments, TTIP's intensification of market competition and deregulation will have negative effects on European workers including falling levels of employment, lower incomes and a reduced labour share of national wealth. A summary of the study can be read here:
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/14-03CapaldoTTIP.pdf

Why Workers Won't Unite: That is the question

In her review of two US books on the decline of unions in the States, Kim Philips Fein of NYU takes us through a hop, skip and a jump of US Union history and then dives into a complex seeming summary of the current state of the American Trade Unions. It's a familiar journey, 100 years ago unions were oppressed but we worked in occupations that lumped us together and now this has disappeared and is being replaced by jobs that are almost wholly precarious and involves mainly service workers in solo occupations.
   So far, so familiar. But let us pause. US union density now stands at about 12%. In the private sector it is 7%. Any explanation for this will have to include the play of certain factors that may not apply in the UK. Or anywhere else in the world. So an examination of the US labour movement is not necessarily very useful when looking at the UK.
http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/why-workers-wont-unite/386228/

Will conference words of unity translate to reality?

Calls for unity from both platform and floor were welcome after a sometimes bitter special local government conference in London on Tuesday - and unity is essential if anything positive is to come out of this costly exercise.

Really important stuff about how we organise, how we consult clearly and transparently and how we engage members, was battered through with little debate as the conference voted time after time to move the business on.

But it did back the motions. Sound and considered templates from Scotland, Northern Ireland, The Service Group and others on strategies for consultation, including using electronic communication, more political lobbying and developing union wide strategies on pay. All very positive, although tying negotiators’ hands when it comes to consulting on last minute offers may yet come back to bite us.

The real challenge for the lay and full time leadership is how they implement the mandate to re-open the pay claim in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – which was clearly what it was all really about for most delegates. The technicalities of that are not simple; members will no doubt be a bit confused as will the whole bargaining structure, so it will test the pronouncements on unity to the full.

Rising inequality caused by weaker unions

A new study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has tracked three decades of income (1980 to 2010) and found that as unionisation declined, the wealth of the richest 10% in advanced countries showed a continuous increase. The decline in unionisation explained about half of the rise in incomes for the richest 10% and half of the increase in the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality).
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/jaumotte.htm

Adding insult to injury - public service workers exempt from Tory call for pay rises

'It’s time Britain had a pay rise' the Tory Prime Minister told the British Chambers of Commerce on Tuesday. But Tory Ministers were quick to point out that Cameron's Damascene conversion to fairness at work does not apply to public sector workers. Within hours of his Leader's speech, Business Minister Matthew Hancock told Radio 4's the World at One that 'we've got to make sure we keep a tight constraint on public sector pay' and then later on the same day popped on Newsnight to shamelessly make the point that 'public sector productivity has gone up pretty sharply in the past 5 years'.
     It's about time UNISON made mincemeat of these contradictory and divisive attacks on our members now that wages are centre stage in the political debate. As Simon Jenkins stated in the Guardian: 'If he had the courage of his economic conviction, Cameron would do the same for the public sector. He can hand out bonuses to welfare recipients and state workers without bruising his deficit reduction strategy. He can print them. He found £375bn overnight to give the banks with no risk of inflation. He can do it again'
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/david-cameron-britain-pay-rise-cough-up-public-sector-welfare

Recovery bypassing workers in low-paid Britain

The LRD's annual earnings survey finds that average earnings growth is on the floor with little improvement in pay settlements over the past 12 months: 'Since the 2008-09 recession, the UK has experienced a “historically unprecedented” fall in the value of earnings compared with consumer price (CPI) inflation, even more compared with retail price (RPI) inflation. The latest figures show average weekly earnings growth of just 0.7%. The Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane described the current position as “an extended period of agony [that] is virtually unprecedented”.
    Part of the problem is that the minority of workers who’ve not been in continuous employment since the recession have seen little or no growth in their earnings, but that seems to be dampening down the wider labour market. As the TUC put it, the economy is proving to be “very good at creating low-paid jobs, but struggling to create the better-paid work”.'
http://www.lrdpublications.org.uk/publications.php?pub=WR&iss=1742&id=idp2055280

Upping the ante on the Living Wage

In recent local government pay negotiations UNISON Scotland secured a commitment from the employers COSLA that the living wage will be the starting point for payment of the local government workers. Much work needs to be done to secure a similar breakthrough in the rest of the UK but a new report from the Greater Manchester Living Wage Campaign outlines the great potential of local authorities in challenging low pay beyond their directly employed workforce using procurement to the benefit of local economies: http://tinyurl.com/nrxxnrm

Britain’s low pay epidemic

'Low Pay Britain 2014', the Resolution Foundation’s annual audit of low pay across Britain, has found that the number of people earning less than two-thirds of median hourly pay, equivalent to £7.69 an hour, rose to 5.2 million, an increase of 250,000 on the previous year and 22% of the national workforce:
http://www.channel4.com/news/low-wages-money-earnings-record-employment-pay

Protest to Survive?

'Since 2011, the trade union movement has focused on building A to B marches and ‘co-ordinated strike action’, bringing together multiple sectors of the economy for a set of largely symbolic and defensive one-day strikes. This strategy has since witnessed a slow death by repetition' writes Michael Chessum on the New Statesman's blog reflecting on last Saturday's Britain Needs a Pay Rise march in London and simultaneous protests in Belfast and Glasgow.
     Over the conference season and in UNISON's In Focus magazine a much needed 'Autumn of Action' was launched to defeat public sector pay restraint but even before our clocks were turned back this strategy foundered as the NJC unions, first GMB and Unite (a crucial fact omitted by Chessum) and then UNISON, suspended the 14 October local government strike. Treasury claims that since 2010 pay restraint has removed £12bn from the pocket of public sector workers with minimal union resistance provides hard evidence to support Chessum's polemic that unions will need to raise our game if we are to defeat the 'entrenched Thatcherite consensus' which promises us further austerity and pay freezes regardless of next May's General Election outcome.

Building the fight for fair pay in the NHS

#NHSpay This week has seen UNISON lead the NHS trade unions into industrial action over pay for the first time in 32 year, the first time coincidentally since the year I was born.
    Monday's four hour stoppage by UNISON, Unite, the GMB, and most notably the Royal College of Midwives, saw disruption across the health service. Appointments and operations delayed or rearranged, wards and departments not cleaned, non-striking managers pushing beds around instead of porters. But more importantly perhaps it got huge and mostly supportive media attention and a huge amount of public support, be that people coming and talking to the picket lines, on radio phone-ins or social media.

Public service strikers are standing up for the real Britain

'After years of real pay cuts public service workers are fighting back' writes Seumas Milne of the

Kingston UNISON midwives on NHS strike

Guardian in an article taking stock of the upsurge in public sector strike action since July. Milne rightly identifies the toxic mix of austerity and privatisation as the key factors in the squeeze on the pay and job security of Britain's public services workforce:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/public-service-strikers-standing-up-for-britain

Solidarity with the NHS workers strike!

#Oct13 #NHSPay Monday 13th October will see the first national pay strike in the National Health Service in England for over thirty years. UNISON, RCM, Unite and GMB members across the country will take strike action for 4 hours from 07.00 until 11.00.
   Nurses, Health Care Assistants, Paramedics, Midwives, Occupational Therapists, Porters, Security, Technicians, Administrative and Clerical staff will stand shoulder to shoulder to show their anger at Jeremy Hunt’s decision to single them out for the worst pay settlement in the public sector. Hunt rejected the miserable 1% recommended by the NHS Pay Review Body and instead imposed an unconsolidated 1% only for those on the top point in each pay band.

A pay ‘proposal’ so bad it’s unbelievable

#njcpay2014 UNISON has called on the employers side of the local government National Joint Council (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) to reconsider their current pay proposals and come forward with ‘improved ones which begin to tackle the hardship facing all of our members.’
http://www.unison.org.uk/news/lga-urged-to-reconsider-on-pay-proposals

Local Government employers lose trust of workforce

A new report published by the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) paints a damning picture of employee trust in local government. And the challenge for trade unions – to raise and restore pay levels – is a factor.

 

The September ILM report, “The Truth About Trust”, measures employee trust in their organisations through a methodology that charts positive opinions minus negative opinions to produce a net high trust figure. In simple terms, if there are more positives than negatives then an employee, on balance, trusts their organisation. If it’s the opposite then an employee, on balance, does not trust their organisation.  

Enough is enough - why Britain needs a pay rise

National industrial action on pay in both health and local government is only two weeks away. Labour Research examines the backdrop to the upcoming TUC demonstration - hard on the heels of the pay strikes - on 18 October in support of the demand that Britain Needs a Pay Rise: ‘In what is one of the slowest recoveries on record, earnings have fallen in value to an unprecedented extent. And, as TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady points out, the economy seems to be very good at creating low-paid jobs, but is struggling to create better-paid work. Action is needed to make work pay’  http://www.lrdpublications.org.uk/publications.php?pub=LR&iss=1735&id=idp2221712&fromopp=y

Gearing up for strike action on pay

An impressive and growing number of UNISON members are now being balloted for industrial action to beat the Coalition Government’s public sector pay freeze. Ballots of NHS members in England and Wales close on 18 September and 20 October respectively. Ballots of local government members in NJC conditioned academy schools and SJC conditioned members in Scotland close on 24 September and 29 September respectively. There is also the possibility of Police Staff holding an industrial action ballot if the recent consultative ballot delivers a majority for rejection of a 1% offer.
    However balloting is not an end in itself. As local government branches in England, Wales and Northern Ireland gear up for a second day of national strike action on 14 October momentum is building for co-ordinated action. Delivering effective action and securing improved outcomes at the negotiating table is the biggest challenge facing UNISON and other recognised unions this autumn:
http://www.unison.org.uk/news/unions-mobilise-for-an-autumn-of-protest-over-pay

Two in five part-time jobs pay less than the living wage

Excellent research by the TUC highlights the prevalence of low pay across the UK, north and south, with women workers bearing the brunt of poverty pay: 'In West Lancashire for example, almost three-quarters (73.9 per cent) of women working part-time earn less than the living wage. West Somerset has the next highest proportion of low-paid, part-time female workers, where more than two-thirds of women earn less than the living wage'
http://www.tuc.org.uk/economic-issues/labour-market-and-economic-reports/labour-market/equality-issues/living-wage-out