By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 30 August 2013
Scotland’s 32 local authorities have offered council workers a 1% pay rise for 2014/15 on top of the same increase given to staff in the current financial year.
The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities made the extended offer at talks in Edinburgh this afternoon with union representatives. The new proposal is accompanied by a commitment to continue meeting the Living Wage for lowest-paid staff, which is expected to rise in November.
The pay hike is below the annual rate of inflation and likely to remain so for the period of the proposed settlement, which follows a two-year public sector pay freeze.
Unison, the biggest municipal union, has called the 1% increase in 2013/14 miserly but its 75,000 members in Scottish local authorities narrowly rejected a strike call in a ballot two weeks ago, after COSLA insisted that any higher increase would have major implications for jobs and services.
After today’s talks, COSLA human resources spokesman Billy Hendry, said a two-year package would provide certainty for staff, and help local communities and businesses in Scotland.
‘Councils value their workforce and are doing the right things to support them through tough times,’ he said. ‘At a time of budget cuts across the public sector we felt it was important to provide some degree of financial certainty for hard pressed households throughout Scotland by investing over £120m in our workforce over the next two years.’
He also highlighted the Living Wage commitment, claiming: ‘No other part of the public sector has signed up to helping the lowest paid on this scale or at this rate. We are talking today about Scottish local government offering a sectoral best deal to its lowest paid workers.’
But the package drew an angry reaction from Unison, which will consult its local government branches in the next seven days on both the revised offer and on how to proceed in the wake of the ballot earlier this month.
Dougie Black, the union’s lead negotiator, said: ‘We consulted in good faith on the employers’ final offer, which was a one-year deal. Our members decided not to take industrial action in support of an improved offer and therefore we accepted the offer and wrote to the employers to accept.
‘It is disingenuous of the employers then to undermine that position by making a further offer that has been made outside the accepted bargaining machinery, as was the first offer,’ he added. ‘There comes a point where we wonder about the credibility of the bargaining machinery if this is the way the employers treat it.’
