Your web story, ‘Union members might accept job losses in return for more say’, reports less than 10% of my speech to the CIPFA conference – and so takes the little mentioned entirely out of context. It creates the impression that Unison is prepared to negotiate away our members’ jobs in return for vague promises about in-house service delivery and genuine engagement. We most certainly are not. As you reported, I made my view very clear – that every redundancy is a personal tragedy. We will fight to defend every job cut
It would have been more accurate if the story had also reported that my feelings ran ‘counter culture’ to the tone of the conference and that I was angry. I said that there was no such thing as the Con-Lib ‘positive redundancies’ and ‘progressive cuts’ and that we are most certainly not ‘all in this together’. I noted that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the industrialised world, that public services are all that many people ‘own’ and that the government has talked up the crisis in order to create a small state and then have the nerve to talk about a ‘Big Society’.
I also said that two-thirds of public sector workers are women – three-quarters in local government and health – and that the cuts are an attack on women’s pay and conditions and therefore on children, since research shows that childcare, children’s school trips and uniforms are more likely to be paid out of women’s earnings. I also said that suggestions at the conference that Child Benefit should cease to be universal were misguided since it is the only benefit paid directly to women and not all women in households with high earning partners benefit from that income.
I also said that Unison wanted top quality public services and that we want ‘public efficiency’ – not the random cuts currently taking place. I said that I wanted the best possible use of public money and that much of that was lost through privatisation in transaction costs, consultants ‘ inflated costs, the shareholder ‘premium’ and oversized salaries for senior company managers and executives. It made no sense for a council to pay an agency between £13 and £17 an hour for a homecare worker who was paid only the national minimum wage, no travel costs and had to pay for her own uniform. Direct service delivery and in-sourcing would ensure that public money was spent on the public.
For the record, I also pointed out that local government has suffered 23,000 redundancies already and the Local Government Association had boasted that it had made 50% more savings than asked for by central government in the last Comprehensive Spending Review round. Local government workers are the worst paid in the public sector and the 10% cut in pay that had been hinted at would put the lowest paid on an hourly rate below the national minimum wage.
I make no bones of the fact that I said that if councils were committed to in-sourcing and an in-house workforce and real engagement of our members’ knowledge and experience – rather than paying consultants with no knowledge a fortune – then we could at least engage in negotiations. If those conditions were met, there would, of course, be considerable savings and therefore fewer redundancies to talk about.
In response to Councillor Kelly, who asserted that the previous government had created lots of unnecessary jobs in local government, I said that I had no idea what those jobs were, although I do wish now that I had advocated a large cut in councillors’ expenses.
I concluded by asking local government employers present to put the recently issued Reducing workforce costs document, by Local Government Employers, in the bin.
Heather Wakefield is the head of the local government service group at Unison
