By Tash Shifrin
Sheffield City Council has threatened to sack its entire 13,000 workforce and rehire staff on new contracts in the latest dispute over pay and grading structures.
Sheffield City Council has threatened to sack its entire 13,000 workforce and rehire staff on new contracts in the latest dispute over pay and grading structures.Councils have to review their pay structures under the terms of the 1997 National Single Status Agreement, signed by unions and employers, which aimed to ensure that men and women received equal pay for work of equal value.
But Sheffield Unison has branded the process used to implement a new pay structure as ‘fundamentally flawed’.
A spokesman for the union branch said: ‘People aren’t going to achieve equality by this process.’ Unlike other local authorities, Sheffield had not evaluated individual jobs, but was using ‘a job family modelling approach… coming up with generic job descriptions’, he said. Changes to terms and conditions would also hit many workers.
‘Around 40% of the workforce will lose out – and a lot of these are women. Lunchtime supervisors on £40 a week will face a pay cut and nursery staff and teaching assistants are losing £3,000-plus a year.’
The council has issued a formal HR1 notice of redundancies to cover all staff – a move Unison called ‘a thinly veiled threat: sign up or lose out on a job’.
But council chief executive John Mothersole said: ‘Within this process by law there are certain formalities we have to comply with. They include issuing an HR1 notice to the government.’
The council was seeking an agreement with the unions, he said, but added: ‘If a collective agreement is not reached, then each employee will receive an individual letter with their new contract details.’ Staff who did not sign would have their contracts terminated, but would be offered re-engagement on new terms.
Sheffield is not the only area where local authorities and unions have clashed over pay structures. Last year, thousands of Birmingham workers walked out over the imposition of new contracts.
Hammersmith and Fulham council was forced to back down over a similar move in November, after unions threatened to ballot for strike action – although the London borough’s move was prompted by cost-cutting rather than equal pay.
