Councils and Government ‘sleepwalking towards second year of industrial action’

Unions have urged Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf to find extra money to up a pay offer made to council workers or face sleepwalking towards another year of industrial strife.

Local authority workers – which includes refuse workers, cleaners and school staff – have rejected a deal put to them by council umbrella body Cosla which would have seen pay go up below inflation.

On Tuesday three unions wrote to Mr Yousaf to urge him to increase money available from the Scottish Government so council workers can be given a better pay deal.

Joanna Baxter, Unison Scotland’s head of local government, warned that Cosla and the Scottish Government were “sleepwalking towards a second year of industrial action”.

“No-one wants to see rubbish piling up on the streets again and schools threatening to close,” she said.

The letter that unions GMB, Unison and Unite wrote to Mr Yousaf, Deputy First Minister Shona Robison and local government minister Joe FitzPatrick said councils “cannot continue to be the poor relations of the public sector” and called for an urgent face-to-face meeting with the ministers and Cosla.

The offer by Cosla would have seen Scottish council worker pay increase by 5% from April 1 this year, and varying increases depending on pay band from January 1 next year.

But the unions said the proposal fell short of their claim made earlier this year, was “far short of inflation” and amounted to a “real-terms pay cut”, and for the lowest paid workers was below deals struck in the other parts of the UK.

“The financial crises that local government face is a direct result of underfunding over a protracted period of time and only by providing a long-term solution to this will we avoid a cycle of industrial dispute year after year with the result that local government workers become increasingly exasperated and disillusioned by the way they are being treated,” the letter signed by the three unions said.

And, in the two-page letter, the unions said employers continued to argue they do not have enough money to allow them to increase pay for those on the lowest grades without disadvantaging those on the middle incomes.

The Scottish Government and Cosla have been approached for comment.