This piece by Richie Venton, SSP trade union organiser, was originally published in the Scottish National, 01/09/2026.
“We’ve had enough!” chanted several hundred council workers at a hastily organised, angry demonstration outside the meeting of Glasgow City Administration Committee (CAC) on 20 August.
Members of the council workers’ unions – Unison, GMB and UNITE – warned the assembled councillors of the political consequences if they went ahead with their Pay and Grading package, involving totally inadequate compensation for decades of wage discrimination against women workers, and absolute pay cuts for thousands of them. Workers blasted out: “Vote for this today – no votes in May!”
All ten SNP and all three Scottish Green Party councillors on the CAC committee ignored the workers’ voices. They voted through a grading structure which means 26% of council workers get no pay rise, and another 11% suffer absolute pay cuts. That’s over 2,500 workers, 60% of them women, with lower-paid roles disproportionately impacted. The SNP and Scottish Green councillors voted to slash workers’ wages by up £11,500 annually – worse still than the £10,000 previously predicted.
To sweeten the poison, the SNP/Green alliance increased the pay protection period from their original 6 months to a year – still presenting workers with a cliff-edge fall in incomes in April 2028.
A perverse outcome to the 20-year-long battle for equal pay.
As I write this column, workers are receiving written confirmation of the pay cuts they’ve been verbally notified of. I know of women in tears after being told they face a £9,000 pay cut, despite increased workload and regularly working unpaid overtime. Or care workers and school support staff worried sick at facing £2,000 to £3,000 loss of annual wages. Many of those hit are women who fought against the Labour council for equal pay from 2006 onwards.
SNP council leader Susan Aitken had the gall to appeal for “political bravery” in voting for these measures. She insisted “this is a Glasgow problem, made in Glasgow”, declaring there was no chance of (and no case for) approaching the Scottish government for what she contemptuously called “a bailout” – when in fact central governments at Holyrood and Westminster have robbed Glasgow of £500million in funding in recent years.
The SNP and Scottish Greens should hang their heads in shame.
But Labour’s protestations reek of the rankest hypocrisy, since they created this decades-long pay injustice!
Between 2007-2017, the then Labour-dominated council ferociously fought against the demands of women workers for equal pay. Trade union-funded Labour councillors squandered at least £2.5million of council taxpayers’ money on legal actions to block the justified demand for equal pay for work of equal value.
The SNP won a big mandate in the 2017 council elections by promising to end Labour’s grotesque injustice. But after 10 months of fruitless talks in 21 separate meetings, it took strike action by 8,000 predominantly women workers in October 2018 to get results against the crime of female-dominated roles in cleaning, catering and care being paid up to £3-an-hour less than workers in comparable, male-dominated jobs. That heroic collective action – with the solidarity of male cleansing workers, who refused to cross women’s picket lines – won payments totalling £770million to about 19,000 workers.
The SNP/Scottish Greens are now trampling past promises in the muck.
The council will backdate compensation to 2023, but base the amount paid to each worker on their entry level pay to the job – not their actual pay at each point since.
Whereas the councillors estimate their compensation package will cost £76million, they reject the joint unions’ demand for full backdated equal pay because – according to them – it would cost £133million. So, by their own figures, the council are robbing workers of £57million in compensatory back-payments.
As an outrageous, dictatorial means of imposing these measures, the Pay and Grading Report – agreed by the SNP and Scottish Greens – furthermore states that if collective agreement cannot be reached, they may consider “other lawful options”- including “dismissal of existing contracts and offers of re-engagement on revised terms and conditions.”
Ever heard of that before? That’s the notorious method deployed by British Gas, Birmingham Labour council and many other employers, endorsed by the previous Tory government, commonly known as ‘fire-and-rehire’.
It’s a bludgeon to bully workers, break the backs of the unions, and impose worsened conditions.
It’s a method Westminster’s Labour government promised to outlaw, but have not properly done, delaying reforms to it until January 2027, and then leaving loopholes whereby employers can still put this machine-gun to workers’ heads “in cases of genuine financial difficulty”.
All of which may help explain why the SNP and Scottish Greens rammed through a partial Pay and Grading package, excluding over 5,000 other council staff, conscious of these deadlines and get-out clauses.
The underlying problem is totally inadequate funding of councils by central governments, and the regressive, inadequate funding methods they deploy for local government.
There are only two ways to implement equal pay for comparable jobs; levelling up, or levelling down. But the former requires additional funds, otherwise workers are hammered with pay cuts – robbing Peter (and often Petra) to pay Pauline.
Months ago, COSLA estimated a £1billion shortfall in Scottish government funding to the 32 local authority budgets this year and next (£530million in 2026/7 alone).
Well over £500million has been stolen in funding from Glasgow City Council by the Holyrood government in recent years, as they devolved Westminster’s destructive austerity.
Instead of lying down in prostration, accepting that fate, Glasgow city councillors should agree a revised package with the trade unions that is fully equality-proofed, with no loss of earnings for any worker, with full compensation for years of appalling, gender-based pay inequality – and mount a campaign alongside the workforce to win back some of the stolen millions off the Scottish Government, to pay for it. That is what Scottish Socialist Party councillors would do.
Alongside that, they should adopt the Scottish Socialist Party’s long-established alternative to the regressive, totally inadequate Council Tax, and demand that Holyrood urgently introduces the SSP’s progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax.
Our most recent calculations (based on 2024 data) prove this would double this source of funding to Scotland’s councils, from £2.7billion Council Tax to £5.3billion in Scottish Service Tax – while only charging more to the richest 20% of people.
This battle is far from over. It took the 1968 Fords Dagenham sewing machinists’ strike to enforce introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Act, and 50 years later the Glasgow equal pay strike to win initial compensation. Assuming the unions win members’ votes for strike action, a mighty struggle for proper funding from the Scottish government can be won.
SSP members inside and outside the council workforce will help build united resistance to these outrageous attacks, in defence of equal pay and compensation without detriment to the wages of a single council worker.
And in next year’s council elections, the SSP will offer a fighting socialist alternative of equal pay, reversal of service cuts, and taxation of the rich to transform the lives of workers and their communities. Workers deserve genuine socialists to represent them.
Richie speaks at a demonstration in support of the council workers, 20/08/2026.