Employers Briefing

This briefing outlines UNISON's main response to recent briefings being circulated by the Local Government Employers on the imminent strike action planned for 16th and 17th July.

As you will be well aware, the 2.45% offer amounts to a pay cut by any measure of current inflation - the latest in ten years of pay cuts for all our members on NJC pay and conditions, many of whom are already on low wages. In fact, over 230,000 earn less than £6.50 pence an hour.

While we would not argue for big increases in council tax, councillors and the public need to recognise that our members ARE local services. There is no distinction between services and staff, since few council functions can be done by machines or robots. Most councils spend the largest part of their budget on staff. Therefore council tax needs to be at a level that can sustain recruitment and retention of workers who are well paid enough to keep doing the job.Council tax is at an all time low. Last year, nationally it fell in real terms by 0.3%, the first real fall since 1994.

Efficiency savings in England alone last year were £763 million – more than the government asked for. You can’t keep cutting budgets, keeping council tax down and expect the lowest paid workers in the public sector to fill that gap.

As at 1 April 2007, English councils had doubled the amount in their bank accounts for non-school activities from £5,488,000,000 in 2002 to £11, 605,000,000.That’s right - 11.6 BILLION pounds of reserves – more than half the local government pay bill, and certainly enough to fund a decent pay rise.

Our members are the victims of inflation, not the cause of it. Don’t just take our word for it. There have now been numerous economics professors publicly stating that public sector pay rises have “nothing to do with inflation” (Stephen Nickell – Nuffield College), “an undergraduate who wrote an essay that inflation was caused by public sector wage rises would receive a FAIL.” (Andrew Oswald in the Financial Times).

However, inflation is not some abstract economic concept as far as our members are concerned. It means their food and fuel bills rising between 30 and 40 percent in the last year. It means huge rises in childcare costs over the last 12 months. These increases have hit our members hard. Small percentage pay increases are of low importance to the city fat cats but they can make a huge difference to the household budgets of our low paid workers.

This is not just an issue of fair pay but also of equal pay and low pay - 75% of the local government workforce are women and many are low paid. The low paid spend a higher proportion of their income on basic necessities. Yesterday a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report said that “a single person in Britain today needs to earn at least £13,400 a year before tax to afford a basic but acceptable standard of living”. Local government employees on the lowest grade receive only £11,577 - £6 an hour. You have to be on scale point 11 to be earning that amount in local government.

As a responsible trade union we pick our fights carefully. Having assessed the mood of our members (through consultative ballot and branch meetings held up and down the country and finally by an industrial action ballot) we know the result of the ballot is representative of our members’ views and can not be ignored. Only 10% of all NJC members have voted to accept the offer.

We would prefer to avoid industrial action and we have told the employers – and continue to tell them – that we want to negotiate.

To avoid a pay cut, even the Government’s ‘cheat’ measure of inflation which ignores housing and council tax costs – the Consumer Price Index - would require a pay increase of 3.3 %. The National Office for Statistics has shown that the Retail Price Index figure for inflation was 4.3% in May. Earnings across the economy are rising at 3.8% to April this year in the private sector.

We have to bring the employers back to the negotiating table. We are proud of our membership and the employers know that UNISON will not stand by and accept unfair attacks on their wages. UNITE has also voted to strike alongside us.

We enclose an appendix (A) detailing the costs of strike action for those on various pay scale points and what the proposed pay increases and inflation increases would mean in real terms.

Appendix A

Related pages:

Author: xxx