Public Service Not Private Profit
May 2011
City and County of Swansea
Review
What’s happening to our terms and conditions? IN ITS TRADE-MARK fashion the current administration informed staff via the local media before Christmas of a disgraceful ‘wish-list’ of serious cuts to our terms and conditions. These were out-lined in a letter to all staff later. The list includes proposed cuts to annual leave and sickness which are part of our nationally-agreed rights in the Green Book, and not able to be subject to local changes. UNISON and the other trade-unions have already made it clear in negotiations that we are not agreeing any changes in these conditions. However the council still stated in a letter to the trade unions that “the proposals on these terms will not be withdrawn. Furthermore, it is not accepted that there is an inability to negotiate these terms at a local level.” In response there was a series of very successful branch meetings for all union members in February at which over 700 members attended, and with over 250 attending the lobby of the council budget meeting later that month. Hundreds more members took part in the massive 500,000-strong TUC March at the end on March in London. Since this time neither the threat to not pay us for sick-days or cut annual leave have been
Inside
The ‘Big Society’
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A message to all non-members... WHILST YOU ARE not in a trade union be comforted in the knowledge that nearly 5000 employees within the City and County of Swansea have joined UNISON. The reason you should feel comforted is that these Unison members and members of other trade unions are paying week after week to belong to an organisation which has collective bargaining rights with our employer and represents its members during negotiations to the best of its abilities. Ask yourself the question: would our employers have imposed the proposed changes to our terms and conditions if there had been no trade unions to negotiate with? Answer: OF COURSE THEY WOULD HAVE. If you do not belong to a trade union and have not been approached to join Unison please contact your steward or the Branch Office, the de-
tails of which are on the back cover of this newsletter. To those of you who believe you cannot afford to join a trade union it is worth noting that hundreds of the lowest paid employees of this Authority are members of a trade union. If you have made a conscious decision not to join a trade union, you should exercise your conscience and contact our payroll section to inform then that you wish to accept the terms and conditions on offer backdated to January 2011. We are sure that your employer will be grateful for the saving this has achieved. At least, if you, as non-members, take this course of action, our trade union subscriptions will no longer benefit non-members who enjoy improvements to terms and conditions negotiated by trade unions. We won’t hold our breath!
Sports & Social
Bonus Rates
Car Parking
continued from front page
formally withdrawn. No-one should be under any illusion that any withdrawal of these threats will be any evidence of ‘meaningful consultation’ by the council. The proposals are non-negotiable from the start as these are national conditions. The threats should never have been made, and any ceasing of them is a poor and transparent attempt to falsely appear to be ‘compromising’ with the trade unions. There are also currently negotiations over a proposed new Management of Absence Policy which, needless to say, would be more draconian than the current one. Predictably the implication in negotiations is that threats of non-sick payment will be withdrawn if the new policy is agreed to. Initial management plans were for the Initial Absence warning to be ‘live’ for a 5-year period, and changing some of our rights at the Appeal stage, which is currently decided by a committee of Councillors. The current possibility is for the Initial Absence stage to be live for a year (longer than a formal Stage 1 warning!), the rest is still being negotiated and members will be informed further when there is news. The justification for the changes is the perception that sickness rates are ‘high’ - which, even if true, is caused by the stress of job and service cuts and over-work by non-replacement of staff. The trade unions have argued that uniformity of applying the policy needs to be achieved before a new policy is needed. Aside from the above, there remains the threat to close services, sell them off or privatise others wholesale or via benign-sounding ‘social enterprises’. However none of this is inevitable and we face a government in crisis. In the recent election the Lib-Dem’s lost 748 councillors, were fourth in Scotland and were battered in Wales. Whilst Clegg paid a price for his collaboration with Cameron, the coalition will not simply fall apart. This is why the first co-ordinated strike by four unions - the ATL, PCS, NUT and UCU - on 30th June is a very welcome start to the action we need to stop the cuts. Over 800,000 will be on strike against pension cuts and the assault on jobs and services. Unison leader Dave Prentis recently said, “Unless this government changes direction it is heading for industrial turmoil on a massive scale. Unison will ballot one million members to strike to defend their pensions.” Now it’s time to turn those words into action. Imagine if one million members of Unison and one million members of Unite were to strike as well...
CAR-PARKING If you are due to be absent from work for longer than a month, for example for an operation or maternity leave don’t forget to cancel your parking permit if indeed you have one. You can then re-apply for a permit just before your return.
What about bonus’ and JE? ALL MEMBERS ARE very angry about the attacks on holiday and sick-pay entitlements. Of even greater concern to many however is the attacks on bonus-rates via the long-running Job Evaluation (JE) exercise. Equality in pay between male and female workers is a trade-union principle. But the employer’s idea of ‘equality’ will be an attempt to cut bonuses - rather than achieve equality through raising the pay of very many low-paid mostly women members. The councils pays a large range of payments for unsocial hours, enhanced payments, shift allowances and so forth. Some of these long-standing ‘bonuses’ are in fact the result of historical agreements not to employ more staff, and should therefore be seen as a permanent part of employees pay. Whatever the form of the ‘extra’ payment, many members have received this pay for decades and potentially face a pay-cut of up to 40%. Cuts of this depth will mean poverty, home-repossessions, family breakdown and ill-health. All trade unions are currently negotiating JE and no changes will be introduced until new pay structures have been seen. Negotiations will continue across the summer and are expected to be concluded by early September. Implementation is possible by Autumn/Winter of this year but there is no definite timetable. Any final ‘offer’ would also have to seen by trade-union solicitors to assess it’s legality. Finally all members would have to be consulted and to vote on any proposals. All members should be aware however that there is a definite limit to what can be achieved with negotiations, or any legal process. Just because we do not like cuts in pay does not make them illegal. There is no prospect that that any final offer will be acceptable to all members and therefore, in the last resort, industrial action will have to be considered to stop any cuts in pay.
There’s something rotten in Swansea as well
The outcome in any dispute is also not foregone. As the successful disputes by refuse staff in Leeds in November 2009 and Birmingham more recently showed, united, determined and militant action has the potential to win. Unlike the past, and as should be obvious to all, the attack on bonus’ is part of a full-frontal attack on us all. The danger is that we allow the council to play one section of the workforce off against another, or groups of staff ‘keep their heads down’ in the false belief that an attack on others won’t mean they will be next. The trade union slogan of ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ was never really a slogan but a statement of fact - and never has unity and solidarity been more relevant.
Libraries, Leisure Centres, Social Services...
The ‘Big Society’: a cover for cuts? The second claim is that the Big Society will “encourage people to take an active role in their communities” through volunteering and involvement in “social action”. One apparently serious proposal is the introduction of a national Big Society day. Another is that 5,000 new community organisers will be trained to work in deprived areas, create neighbourhood groups, and encourage involvement in “social action”. In the past, such social action would have included It’s hardly surprising campaigning in defence many people see the “Big of services. It’s unlikely, Society” as little more however, that this will than window-dressing for be part of the job dethe wholesale destruction scription of these new of the welfare state. The organisers. huge cuts that the Tories Rather, their emphasis are proposing to make will be on showing peomean they are right to do ple in the poorest comso. Public spending will munities how to make slashed by between 25 more use of their aland 40 percent - much ready extremely limited deeper than anything resources. Moreover, even Margaret Thatcher quite how “voluntary” was able to achieve in the such involvement will be 1980s. It will mean masis far from clear. Accordsively reduced welfare, as ing to the Cabinet Office well as an estimated document, regular com600,000 job losses in the munity involvement will 5000 people joined the ‘Hardest Hit’ march on Parliament on the 11th May public sector. become “a key element against cuts to disability benefits and services. Over 40 organisations and groups of disabled people worked together, led by UK Council of Disabled of civil service staff apCameron’s big idea also People, the Disability Benefits Consortium and the Disability Charities Consortium praisals”. The Tories also tells us something about plan to set up a National the Tories’ vision for BritCitizen Service for 16-year olds, apparently to give them a chance ish society and about the confidence of the coalition to push to develop “the skills needed to be active and responsible citithrough the kind of cuts they want. Cameron first promoted the zens”. Big Society idea last year as a solution to problems of poverty, The need for such a service reflects the fact that astronomical unfairness and inequality. He even quoted Richard Wilkinson and university tuition fees on the one hand and growing youth unemKate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level - a savage attack on the ployment on the other mean that fewer and fewer working class inequality that thirty years of Tory and New Labour policies have young people will be able to acquire these skills through higher produced. education or paid work. Again, it’s not hard to see how involvement in such a scheme will quickly move from being “voluntary” But what does it all actually mean? A recent Cabinet Office to becoming an expectation, with employers favouring those document points to four main strands to the idea. with such experience for jobs. The first is to “Give communities more powers”. It states that new powers will allow community buy-outs of local facilities and A third claim is that the Big Society is about to “Transfer power services faced with closure—post offices, swimming pools, lifrom central to local government”. Here, the aim is to shift braries and so on. The reason they are faced with closure, needresponsibility for spending - and making cuts - to local authorities less to say, is the coalition’s cuts programme. Quite where local in England or to WAG in Wales. communities will find the money for such buy-outs is not exThat way the resulting anger will, Cameron hopes, be directed plained, since Cameron’s proposed “Big Society Bank”, based on not at the coalition but at local councillors. But the only devolufunds taken from unused bank accounts, will go nowhere near to tion of power that has taken place to date - in England - has not matching the scale of the proposed cuts. The plan also says that been to elected councils but to unaccountable middle-class partrained and qualified staff would be ‘replaced’ (i.e. sacked) and ents’ groups and local businesses who want to set up academies local volunteers would be used. It’s a non-starter. Very few of us and “free” schools. have the time, energy or inclination after a hard day’s work to run the local post office, swimming pool or library - let alone The final strand of the Big Society is to “Support co-ops, mutuals, have the skills to match those of the trained and qualified staff charities and social enterprises”. The idea that charities should currently in post. THE EMPLOYER’S PAPER the Financial Times reported last year on David Cameron’s speech to the Tory Party conference: “Having exhumed the idea of the ‘Big Society’, he struggled to breathe life into it. He denied that it was a cover for cuts. But fog descended when he tried to explain.” When even the main bosses’ newspaper can’t make sense of Cameron’s “big idea”, then it’s clear that the Tory leader has a problem.
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take over many of the functions of the state is central to Cameron’s idea. But it’s a sick joke. Firstly, despite New Labour already having encouraged voluntary organisations and charities to take over the running of services, charities still only account for 2.3 percent of workers in the welfare state. Secondly, voluntary organisations are among the biggest victims of the cuts so far, with £11 million taken from organisations in England and Wales that encourage volunteering - and a further £8 million cut from youth volunteering schemes. Nor, as the document claims, will employee-owned co-operatives empower millions of public sector workers to “be their own boss” and help them deliver better services. On the contrary, as the experience of many voluntary sector organisations which have to compete for funding has already shown, it will lead to a race to the bottom. The workers in these co-operatives have to cut their own wages and conditions to compete for contracts. However, it would be wrong to see the Big Society idea as purely a cover for cuts. It also has a more serious ideological purpose. Above all, it is an attempt by David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and their co-thinkers to deal with the problem of what they call the “Broken Society” and with the issue they see as being at the heart of that problem, namely “welfare dependency”. The reason that poor communities are poor, their argument goes, has nothing to do with a competitive profit-driven economy or institutional inequality. They say it is because the welfare state has encouraged people to become ‘over-dependent’ on state services and benefits, and unwilling to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves and their communities. The Tories think that reducing public services through cuts will encourage people to look at
themselves and their neighbours. Somehow this process will help to recreate the kind of community spirit that allegedly existed at some time in the past. It’s an argument we should reject. It’s an attempt to turn the clock back to a pre-welfare state era when working-class people had no choice but to rely on each other and on charities which would classify poor people as “deserving” or “undeserving”. The whole argument is based on a series of myths. The truth is that the vast majority of people want to work, if only jobs were available. That’s why in the 1960s when the economy was booming, unemployment was at historically low levels. And to the extent that society is indeed “broken”, it was the policies of the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s that did most of the damage. It shows the most astonishing brass neck for some of the richest people in the country, like Cameron and Osborne, to criticise the poorest people in our society for reliance on the state. Meanwhile their friends in the banks only continue to make their bonuses as a result of the billions spent by that same state in bailing them out. A final point is one to take heart from. The fact that Cameron and his Lib-Dem collaborators in the coalition feel the need to promote the Big Society - or the latest guise of ‘social enterprises’ - to put a positive gloss on their cuts is a sign not of strength but of weakness. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher felt no such need. The dithering over the child benefit cuts, the back-tracking over selling off the forests and recent election results show this is a government which is unsure of how much it can get away with and what resistance it will encounter. The creation of the welfare state was a huge gain for working-class people. We must not allow the Tories to take it away.
Sports & Social Ffos Las June 7th (evening) Prices from £17.00 th Drayton Manor June 25 Prices from £20.00 inc entry DISNEYLAND PARIS – 2 day pass August 28th – 31st FULL th London Day Trip November 19 Prices from £10.00 rd Children’s Christmas Party December 3 Price £3.00 Bath Christmas Markets December 10th Prices from £6.00 Further information and booking forms available from Lynne Owen lynneowen.suss@hotmail.co.uk or telephone 07790 004 743 Or you can visit www.suss.me.uk This newsletter is produced by the City and County of Swansea Unison Branch. Any letters, comments or suggestions for articles should be posted to the branch address or emailed to Unison@swansea.gov.uk. Correspondence is not guaranteed to be published and contents may not necessarily reflect Unison policy.
Sports and Social Website: www.suss.me.uk
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