GMB members fighting low pay
Strike back against daylight robbery !
by Richie Venton, SSP national workplace organiser
The Scottish Socialist Party - including local SSP councillor for Leven ward, Jim Bollan - offers unqualified support to all council workers in any industrial action they need to take to reverse the daylight robbery of workers' back-pay by West Dunbartonshire Council.
And daylight robbery it is! Thousands of low-paid workers stand to lose
thousands of pounds (£27,000 in at least one case). Money they are
owed after years of being underpaid. Money the Council promised them
in May.
For over 30 years since Equal Pay legislation, local authorities continued to pay women workers less for fundamentally the same work. Most of these councils were run by Labour. They exploited cheap labour to provide public services.
In recent years, the Single Status Agreement was signed.
It took years before councils began to implement it.
But in carrying out their legal duties on equal pay, these cheapskates
refused to properly fund equal pay.
They decided instead to do it on the cheap. They often cut the pay
of men to bring in equal pay 'equalising' downwards instead of upwards,
as the SSP fought for across Scotland.
In many councils they even cut the pay of women - the lowest paid women
at that - to bring in equal pay!
They did this through their flawed, bogus job evaluation systems and
pay reviews.
When the councils eventually got round to implementing equal pay, workers
who had been robbed of their rightful earnings for decades got only a
tiny proportion of what they were owed in compensation packages.
About 40% of it in the case of West Dunbartonshire Council (WDC).
Workers increasingly see through New Labour - they are a million miles
removed from the labour movement pioneers, the socialists and trade
unionists, who defied persecution and poverty generations ago to build
a party of the working class.
New Labour are the new Tories - the party of cuts, privatisation, poverty
pay, closure of elderly people's homes, school closures, profiteering
for the minority and war for oil and empire.
But the SNP are also showing their true colours in WDC. It is almost
impossible not to appear more radical than New Labour on a national scale!
But both locally and nationally the SNP are treating council workers
and other public sector workers to New Labour-style pay cuts.
The SNP council has done the dirt on over 2,500 council workers by robbing their promised back-pay off them. They are imposing vastly inferior terms and conditions on the entire workforce (see Jim Bollan's article on back for details).
Longer hours, less pay, abolition of bonuses,
worse holiday entitlements - on top of the theft of back money due to
most workers in the deal agreed in May.
The SNP are out to impose a 2% pay ceiling on public sector workers across Scotland, while prices let rip through the roof. The SNP want a cheap labour/high profits Scotland, and the SNP councillors in WDC want to blaze the trail on this attack on working people.
They must and can be stopped! United industrial action, combined with a vigorous public campaign in our communities, could halt and reverse this outrageous plundering of pay packets.
On 20th August, 200,000 council workers across all 32 councils in Scotland united in strike action. Members of UNISON, GMB and UNITE stood shoulder-to-shoulder and rocked COSLA (the coalition of Labour, SNP and Lib Dem councils) into a massive climbdown. The employers have now conceded pay talks, after months of refusing, and admitted in writing that neither a 2.5% pay rise nor a 3-year deal is acceptable. They are on the run - in the face of united strike action.
The council
in WDC can be put on the run and forced to reverse this vicious attack
on its workers by united action. The SNP are in a very vulnerable position.
They don't have an outright majority.
They want to keep their national popularity going. They are susceptible
to pressure. A programme of united strikes and public demonstrations
could win back the money workers are entitled to - and restore the conditions
the council wants to obliterate, without even the pretence of consultation,
on 1st March next year.
The local council can afford the package they agreed in May. But even if they couldn't, why don't they have the spine to unite with the unions and demand any necessary funding off the SNP Scottish government?
That is what a Scottish Socialist Party council would do. We would refuse to cut a single penny off any worker's pay while implementing equal pay; defend and improve terms and conditions; and fight like fury alongside the unions and wider public for the funds off Holyrood.
Strike back now! Unite and defeat this daylight robbery! Defend pay, back money, terms and conditions!