By Mike Short, UNISON head of local government
UNISON is asking its council and school members in England and Wales, and council members in Northern Ireland, to vote to go out on strike over the local government employers’ pay offer for 2024.
The industrial action ballot is open now. You should have already received your ballots in the post and it runs until Wednesday 16 October.
As UNISON’s head of local government, I wanted to take a moment to explain why your elected representatives on the committee believe the time is right to vote ‘yes’ for strike action.
The joint unions’ claim and the employers’ offer
In February this year, the joint NJC unions submitted a pay claim for an increase of £3,000 or 10%, whichever was greater.
This claim was based on detailed research into the state of council and school pay. It compared council and school pay against public and private sector counterparts and it paid particular attention to the impact of a decade or more of below-inflation pay increases that council and school workers have suffered since 2010.
It accepted the fact that addressing council and school pay erosion since 2010, which has taken an average of 25% from the value of pay, would take more than a year due to the financial difficulties which councils and schools face.
But it also acknowledged that there are critical issues in the sector around vacancies, workloads and in-work poverty, which must be addressed immediately through pay. So, it proposed a reasonable starting point to both tackle the immediate issues and take the first step in addressing historic pay erosion.
In May, the employers responded with an offer of £1,290. This represents pay increases ranging from 5.8% for those on the lowest pay point to 2.5% for those on the highest.
In June and July, UNISON consulted members on the employer’s offer, and it was overwhelmingly rejected. This gave UNISON and the NJC committee a clear mandate to ballot members for industrial action and to recommend members vote yes for strike action.
Why should you vote yes for industrial action?
Since that consultation, we have seen a new Labour government take power in Westminster that recognises that public sector workers need adequate pay rises.
After taking power, the new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced that this government would accept the recommendations of the public sector pay review bodies in full.
Council and school pay is negotiated directly with the local government employers and, as such, the government’s decision doesn’t necessarily apply to councils and schools. It is up to the employers to improve their offer – though we need the government to do their part by funding it.
After years of bearing the worst of public sector pay squeezes, local government cannot be left behind, once again.
With councils across the country nearing ‘bankruptcy’, how can they afford this?
Over the last 14 years, council budgets have been squeezed to breaking point by a lack of funding from central government. On already skeleton-thin budgets there is predicted to be a £4bn funding gap this year alone for councils in England, Wales and Scotland.
UNISON is sympathetic to the state of public finances which the new government has inherited and they’ve been left a particularly unenviable task to sort out council and school funding.
But the new government must step up and let councils take back control of their finances through higher and longer-term funding settlements. And in the short term they must enable the employers to offer staff a much needed, adequate pay rise.
Voting yes for strike action in this ballot will show your strength of feeling, to the employers and to the government, about your pay. It will demonstrate unequivocally that the time has come for government to step in and address the issues in local government head on.
