02 May 2003
Local authority employers are demanding sweeping changes to the 'nine-to-five' working culture and a radical overhaul of the national pay bargaining system to modernise town hall working practices.
The Employers' Organisation, which represents councils in pay negotiations, is calling for root and branch reforms to the way local authority staff work.
A document it has submitted to the Local Government Pay Commission, set up to advise on the sector's employment issues and due to report to ministers in the autumn, makes plain the scale of its ambition.
'There needs to be a fundamental shift away from regarding a nine-to-five, Monday to Friday working week as the norm.
'Working arrangements must be tailored to suit service requirements while taking account of employees' work-life balance issues,' it says.
At the heart of employers' demands is a move towards much greater local determination of pay rates to reflect local labour market conditions. They are calling for an end to premium payments for working non-standard hours. Employers also want flexibility in job grading so that good performance rather than length of service can be rewarded.
But this raises the possibility of employees doing the same job for the same authority receiving different salaries, and will meet stiff resistance from the unions.
EO executive director Charles Nolda said it was time for working practices to be modernised.
'The employment market has changed,' he said. 'The premium payments favoured by the unions work against the flexibility that better services require. We want the commission to send a clear signal that they are an anachronism.'
The employers' submission drew immediate fire from the public sector unions, which represent many of the 1.3 million workers in local government.
Heather Wakefield, Unison's national secretary for local government, condemned the employers' submission as an attempt to drive down salaries in local government.
She warned that women, who make up more than 70% of the workforce, would be particularly badly hit. 'We fear that the employers wish to use local bargaining to peg women's jobs to market rates, which they know can be lower than those in councils. We have already seen evidence of this with homecare workers.'
These fears were echoed by John Edmonds, outgoing general secretary of the GMB. 'Breaking up national pay bargaining will drive down pay and increase recruitment and retention problems in local government,' he warned.
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