Council workers ‘turning elsewhere’ for careers, MSPs warned

Councils need to be a more attractive place to work “for the good of the country”, union leaders have said.

Members of Unison said as it stands, people are “turning elsewhere” for their careers – with MSPs told council workers can earn “really competitive” salaries working in supermarkets where they “don’t get the same level of hassle”.

Maureen Dickson and John Mooney, both regional organisers for the trade union, spoke about the pressures councils are under as they appeared before MSPs on Holyrood’s Local Government Committee.

Ms Dickson told the committee councils have been “restricting” staff numbers for “so many years”, claiming this “year-on-year build-up of less people” impacts on the workforce.

The warnings come as the Scottish Government is seeking to reduce the overall size of the public sector workforce by 0.5% each year for the rest of the decade.

Finance Secretary Shona Robison warned in June that if no action is taken to reduce the workforce, Scotland could face a near-£5 billion budget black hole by 2030.

Ms Dickson told MSPs “horror stories” of social work staff doing 70-hour weeks because of their workload.

She said: “I worked quite closely with social work colleagues until about 18 months ago, and some of the horror stories we had coming out of there of people working 70-hour weeks and never having a break because they were working weekends as well…

“They could not switch off, because the numbers of cases they were carrying and because of the pride they had in the role they were carrying out in the community, and the sense of responsibility they had to the people they were working with.

“But that’s just not sustainable.”

Ms Dickson said when she began her council career in 1989, “you thought all your Christmases had come at once because you could see the opportunities that were there within local government, they were vast”.

But with reductions in the public sector workforce, she said: “We have lost a lot of that, because there are more attractive jobs or you can get the same level of salary in other jobs where you have got far less responsibility.

“We need to find a way to make these roles more attractive and to make local government an employer again that people want to work in.”

Mr Mooney told MSPs the “reality” of working in local government is “the money these people are paid isn’t comparable to what they can earn elsewhere”.

He said: “You have got people who can move into other jobs, even retail these days with the supermarkets, where that kind of money is really competitive.

“What you find is they don’t get the same level of hassle, they don’t have professional bodies overseeing them where a mistake doesn’t mean you leave your job.”

He added that when he started working for the council in the late 1990s, there “was an ability there for people to get in the door and work their way up and build themselves a career”.

Mr Mooney added this was “not only good for them and their family but actually adds to the country”.

However he said: “The ability to do that has been severely, severely lessened.

“These type of roles have taken hit after hit over the last 10, 15 years, and our concern… what we believe to be the general plan across the public sector in Scotland to reduce staffing levels, that will do nothing to fix that.

“I think essentially local government needs to have a future, that’s really what it boils down to.

“People within local government have watched cut after cut, they have watched job freeze after job freeze, they have had to carry the workload.

“People in local government care about doing a good job and they understand the responsibility of public service, but the problem is when you are continually told that you don’t matter, when it’s cuts yet again, or that role isn’t being filled so you just need to muddle along, or the career opportunities you thought were once there are now gone.

“In that environment you get a situation where people are turning elsewhere. The reality is, for the good of this country, we can’t afford to have people turning elsewhere.”

A spokesperson for the local government body Cosla said it “shares the view that local government should be an employer of choice”.

The Cosla spokesperson added: “Working in local government is a rewarding career in many ways, but years of funding restraint and increasing demand mean that we struggle to recruit and retain in some key areas like social care.

“Pay is clearly a factor in this – we are using our collective voice and working with our trade union partners to continue to improve pay and conditions for local government employees over time.

“Our demand for councils to have fair and flexible funding for local services must be met so we can continue to make local government an attractive career in which people can make a meaningful difference.”