UNISON’s 600,000 local government members will continue their campaign for fair pay today (1 April) with public events being held in town halls and outside workplaces across the UK.
The formal protest day, which takes place during the TUC’s Fair Pay Fortnight, will highlight the dire state of local government pay and the disastrous impact the Government’s austerity agenda has had on local jobs and services.
1 April marks the fifteenth anniversary of the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in 1999. UNISON was a driving force behind the minimum wage, which was intended to act as a safety net to protect vulnerable workers. In 1999, the lowest pay scale in local government was 24% above the level of the minimum wage, which was set at £3.60 an hour for adult workers.
Fast forward 15 years and the lowest paid local government workers earn just 14 pence per hour – or 2.2% – above the minimum wage. This represents a fall in pay of 18% in real terms, back to the level of the 1990s. Last month the Local Government Association was forced to offer a pay rise to the lowest paid staff to prevent some workers falling below the minimum wage when it rises to £6.50 in October.
Heather Wakefield, UNISON’s Head of Local Government, said:
“Local government workers and the services they provide have faced four years of devastating cuts under this Tory-led Government and today our members are saying enough is enough.
“The National Minimum Wage was introduced to protect workers who are most vulnerable to low pay. It was not designed as a tool to benchmark the pay of skilled workers delivering essential public services.
“75% of the local government workforce are women, who are increasingly undervalued and who are not prepared to sit back and let their families slide further into poverty. What we desperately need is a commitment from the Government to implement a Living Wage.”
UNISON, GMB and Unite – the unions representing 1.6 million local government workers – are consulting members over last month’s pay offer which will see the vast majority of staff receive a rise of just 1%. The unions had sought a £1.20 an hour minimum increase to bring the bottom rate of pay in local government to the level of the Living Wage and restore some of the pay lost by higher earners.
More than half a million local government workers earn less than the current Living Wage* and a million earn less than the Coalition’s ‘low pay’ threshold of £21,000 a year.
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Notes to Editors
*The Living Wage is £7.65 and £8.80 in London.
