There will not be a collective holding of breath from 1.5 million local government workers on October 26, when Unison lodges its claim for their 2010/11 pay increase. Messrs Darling and Osborne have been vying with each other to see who can freeze public sector pay the hardest and, with successive pay rounds having dealt them the cruellest hand, council employees will know they have one big fight on their hands to get any pay rise at all.
While Goldman Sachs and other banks return to their big, unregulated, bonus ways, local government workers are hard at it, dealing with the fall-out from the recession Sachs and others helped to create. Hard-pressed housing staff, social workers, benefits advisors, teaching assistants and school meals employees are all feeling the effects in the workplace as hardship grips local communities. No reward for them though. Just more for less: 12,000 redundancies so far this year and many more to come as the Local Government Association pursues a path of council tax cuts and ‘efficiency’ savings way beyond the necessary. Our members fear for their livelihoods, but carry on regardless. Oh what misdeeds are masked in the cloak of recession!!
Alastair ‘Mini Milk’ Darling intends to freeze pay from 2010 ‘only’ for those in the top-paying 40,000 jobs, while 700,000 ‘middle ranking’ others will see rises of between just 0% and 1%. In comes Tory George ‘Magnum’ Osborne, with a pledge to freeze everyone’s pay in the public sector – except those below £18,000. That’s from 2011 – after the general election – of course. Over the border, the Scottish National Party intends to mirror the climate and apply a hard frost to the best paid, though is holding back from a blanket freeze.
Local government workers are already at the very bottom of the public sector pay heap, having been denied for years the sort of (not over-generous) awards applied to the police, teachers and NHS staff they work alongside. The scandalous gender pay gap has not been eased by extra funds – as was the case with Agenda for Change in the NHS – and annual leave, parental rights and access to training all lag far behind. No wonder the council employers’ claim to be ‘an employer of choice’ leaves Unison members chuckling!
Even local authority chief executives and senior managers – the most-hated of the Taxpayers’ Alliance – are not overpaid in comparison with the private sector. How many City types would be prepared to run complex, multi-million pound businesses with tens of thousands of employees for £200,000 a year? Not many. And while it is entirely wrong that pay at the top of councils has been allowed to increase at rates which make workers lower down the scale weep, those at the top don’t deserve a pay freeze. Instead, the rest of the workforce should be awarded increases to help them catch up, in line with the principles of differentials based on equal pay for work of equal value.
This is all being made worse by a steady trickle of Tory councils threatening to pull out of sector-wide bargaining and impose even worse conditions than the miserly National Joint Council agreement provides for. Newly-blue Nottinghamshire, with its appropriately-named leader, Ms Cutts, and the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead are just two who want to do their own thing, while Westminster and other Cameron councils in London are still complaining about the 1% ‘improved’ award made for 2009/10. At the same time, Essex is pursuing a £300m ‘efficiency’ programme by asking IBM to run the council and ‘transferring’ 850 home care workers and others to ‘Essex Cares Ltd.’, with no doubt devastating consequences for their pay and conditions.
A look at the facts about recent pay settlements and the myth of public sector ‘gold-plating’ shows that a decent pay rise for local authority workers would not only be fair, it would reflect what’s going on elsewhere in the economy. Incomes Data Services show that while 30% of economy-wide settlements this year have been ‘freezes’, these have largely been negotiated, not imposed. They are in manufacturing, engineering, chemicals, media and telecoms, while energy, finance and the low-paid service sector – a rival labour market for local government - have largely escaped the chill. Most freezes were for 12 months only and 60% of employers say they will ‘defrost’ pay by 2010. IDS also show that public sector pay has had little influence on private sector negotiations, where more than 60% of settlements have been between 2% and 4% - defying downward inflation.
Unison has always been a big supporter of local democracy, but the sad fact is that vital local government workers are constantly undermined by a system of local politics and finance which leaves them subject to the sort of political vagaries which do not affect other public sector workers. This has had increasingly negative consequences, and means that almost 500,000 – mostly women – should be outside of Magnum George’s pay freeze, with earnings under £18,000. That’s very little indeed for the sort of jobs Unison members do and will be even less next year, with inflation predicted to rise to 2.5% as VAT is re-imposed in January and energy costs escalate. But will Cameron’s councils even play ball with Osborne’s formula and reward the lowest paid?
Inequality within the public sector, with councils at the bottom of the pay league, can only lead to even greater recruitment and retention problems for local authorities and declining quality of service. That would be a shame after all the effort our members have put in to improving services in recent years. Inequality across the economy has grown and is once again being thrown into sharp relief by the return of the Big Bonus. Perhaps it’s time to consider ways of ensuring pay parity across public services? It may also be time for that High Pay Commission or other ways of ensuring that the relative worth of jobs across the whole economy is measured and reflected in pay and conditions.
After all, who could really say that a Goldman Sachs trader is worth more than those who feed and educate children, house the homeless and care for the vulnerable elderly? A diminishing number, according to the polls. So will councils and the Local Government Association do the right thing this year and show our members some respect for keeping communities together? I hope so. If not, I hope they’re not expecting their votes when May 2010 comes around.
