Dave Prentis sent a simple message to the coalition today: “Hands off our pay, hands off our people, hands off our public services.”
Addressing the TUC Congress in Bournemouth, UNISON’s general secretary said that millions of people were “paying for a deficit none of them caused”.
He said that they were “kept awake at night worrying about losing their jobs; struggling with rocketing prices – plummeting pay.”
It was, he said, “the longest and deepest slump in a century – the biggest squeeze on real pay in decades,” yet while pay packets had shrunk by £52bn since the banks crashed the economy, and with wages in free-fall, “bankers’ bonuses shoot up 82% in a year”.
In a sideswipe at the media, Mr Prentis added that the issue of home carers, “often paid well below even the minimum wage, left to get from one client to another under their own steam, at their own costs, in their own time” was “another scandal, barely worth a mention by the media in Tory Britain.”
He told delegates that a recent UNISON survey in prosperous Surrey, which is home to some of the wealthiest people in the country, had revealed that over 6,000 council workers were on employed zero-hours contracts.
It was an example, he said, of “two nations living side by side”.
Noting the rise in loan sharks and pay-day loans, with the likes of Wonga seeing “profits up by a third in a year”, he added that the country was also seeing the rise of a “new bank industry – food banks”, with users up from “25,000 in 2008 to 350,000 last year”.
Mr Prentis said that it was “a picture of modern Britain that should shame this coalition: no certainty, no safety net, no dignity. “
Of the chancellor’s claim that economic recovery is underway he said: “Try telling that to the million young people without jobs” or the “millions who have two or three jobs but still don’t earn a living wage.”
It was, said Mr Prentis, “a recovery for the millionaires – not the millions”.
He told delegates that unions needed to put an end to “the scandal of poverty pay; the insecurity of casual work; the squeeze on living standards across the board”.
Promising that UNISON would campaign and organise “to break this unjust pay freeze”, he added that, when the union acts, it expects “our Labour Party” to support it.