What to expect, what to do…

If you’re at the City Council waiting for those results, here’s a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to what I think will happen, and some suggestion on what to do about it. This is based on my experiences at the County Council, and from talking to people at other councils, but it’s still just my opinion. City may have different methods and objectives to others. Caveat emptor.

Why is it (really) happening?

1. To protect the council from no-win no-fee legal action based on the Equal Pay Act. This has been a growing problem for councils, and you can tell how seriously County takes it by the fact that when they eventually hand out the backpay cheques to the winners, they will forced to sign an agreement stating that they will not take legal action against the council.

2. The government is desperate to reduce its costs and fight inflation. A good way of doing this is to cut public sector wages. The government has been quietly doing this over several years. Nurses and hospital cleaners were one of the first hit. More recently we have seen firemen, teachers, policemen and council workers all taking their turn under the whip.

3. The government, and the councils, want to reduce their workforce, mainly for the reasons above. I think they actually want to make their staff miserable, so that many will leave. There has been a mass exodus from the County. The government may hope that they boost the economy by joining the private sector.

4. The council may want to knock holes in their structures, to give new blood a chance to rise up the ranks. I think there is a feeling that councils need to be a bit more dynamic, and that they need a good shake-up.

What will happen

The council will announce the results. They will say that few lose out (around 20%) but looking around you, you will find it hard to believe it because so many seem to have taken a wage cut. You will be told that women do well out of the deal, yet it may seem that almost every woman you know is taking a cut (if the City is like the County, then 80% of the workforce is female).

Unison will (gently?) oppose the pay cuts, but probably won’t rock the boat too much. They will probably welcome the pay increases for certain sections of the workforce, e.g. careworkers and dinner ladies. You may notice that the evaluation seems in favour of some (not all! - expect cuts for bin men and road workers) manual workers at the expense of admin staff and general office workers. The council needs the unions to accept the deal before they can accept it themselves. Unison will ballot its members on whether to accept the deal. Since the majority of the workforce either get a raise or stay the same, you face an uphill battle to get a no vote (though it was very close at County, and sometimes it goes against them, e.g. Birmingham). If the vote passes, the City councillors will meet to vote, and they will vote yes. (At other councils, the majority party votes yes regardless of which party it is! Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem have all voted yes at various councils… and all of them have opposed it in others!)

Following the implementation, many staff will leave, take voluntary redundancy, early retirement or move to the private sector., Those that remain may face constant uncertainty, as the council shifts gears into being more like private industry - they’ll play fast and loose with the rules, you’ll be understaffed, you’ll see new faces coming in and people getting promotions. The process will rumble on and on with appeals against the job score etc. Many of those who manage to stick it out will eventually, after a long fight, get their old wages back, though they may find themselves saddled with more work and responsibility than before.

What you should do

Organise. Get people together and make sure they join Unison so they get a vote on whether to accept the proposals (you can always leave afterwards). Show up to meetings and kick up a fuss. Demand, in person, in writing, at union meetings, demand that Unison campaign AGAINST accepting the proposals. Get your message out there, every way you can, that the proposals are unfair on those who take cuts, and that it’s a bad deal for those who stay the same (they will probably lose bonus payments, terms and conditions etc, thus losing overall). Point out that while the pay rises are good for those who get them, and they deserve them, it’s also dangerous - what happens when the cost of employing internal cleaners suddenly goes up? Privatisation? We’ve seen something like that happen in the NHS, not yet in councils…

Write to councillors, MPs and the press. Keep the pressure up and try to get that ‘no’ vote. You can then force the council back to the negotiating table.

If you don’t get the no vote, then it will be difficult to stop it. At this point (and a good MP should clue you into this), you could resort to legal action. There are two prongs of attack here - prosecute them for breaching employment law, or prosecute them for breaches of the Human Rights Act. Might seem odd to use the Human Rights Act, but I’m told that it could be a very good line of attack, because when it eventually reaches the European court after being rejected by the UK ones, you have a very good chance of winning. There is currently someone trying this approach at another council.

If you are forced to sign a new contract or else leave, then you can probably sue for unfair dismissal. See the video on the website for that one. Even without the device of the contract, you may be able to sue for unfair dismissal through wage reduction.

Otherwise, you’ll just have to sit back and take it. Your best bet then is go through the appeals process for the evaluation, and also try to take on some extra duties and responsibilities, thus forcing a re-evaluation under the concept of a ‘changed job’. Or, just give up and leave the council to stew in its own madness for a few years.

A good place to start is to set up an e-petition against the evaluation, then email it around everyone you can. This brings the angry people together so they can draw strength from it. Then all you have to do is turn an online angry mob into a real life one. If you can get the unions to all this for you, then so much the better - that’s what you pay them for, after all.

Consider signing the petition on the Number 10 website

Good luck.

This entry was posted on 01/07/2008 at 07:35 pm and is filed under City Council, Action, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.