UNISON has welcomed a move by South Lanarkshire council in Scotland to increase wages for its lowest paid employees.
The council will be implementing the latest living wage increase – raising its lowest hourly rate from £7.20 to £7.56 – and paying an extra £250 a year to its workers on less than £21,000 a year, full-time.
It will do this by consolidating a one-off lump sum payment of £250 from last year into basic pay, on top of the 1% national pay rise in Scottish local government.
“The council, and council leader Eddie McAvoy, are to be congratulated on this decision to recognise the need to protect and improve the pay of their low paid staff,” who are mostly women, said South Lanarkshire UNISON branch secretary Stephen Smellie.
But he noted that thousands of workers in the county get much less than the living wage – particularly in parts of the private and voluntary sector, where the national minimum wage of £6.19 an hour is often the going rate.
This includes many workers employed to provide public services which have been contracted out to private companies or voluntary sector organisations.
Mr Smellie noted that “the council recently invited tenders to deliver home care services” and that many companies providing that service now pay just over the minimum wage – but on zero-hour contracts with no guarantee of actual work.
Calling the situation a “council-funded scandal”, Mr Smellie urged “workers in the private home care companies to contact us to discuss how we can build a moral campaign in Lanarkshire for economic justice.”
