By Richie Venton, SSP national trade union organiser
Thousands of workers employed by Glasgow City Council face a renewed battle around their entirely justified demand for equal pay.
New pay and grading proposals by the SNP-led council, currently being voted on by the administration, would mean thousands of workers facing savage pay cuts of up to £10,000.
After eight years of negotiations with the unions, the SNP administration’s package covers 24,000 workers – but divisively leaves about 20% of the workforce out of the scheme.
By the council’s own admission, it will lead to 63% of council workers getting some kind of pay rise; 26% getting little or nothing; but 11% suffering pay cuts.
As the unions have pointed out, 60% of those hit by the prospect of wage cuts are women, with lower-paid roles disproportionately impacted. That’s a perverse outcome to the long-running battle for equal pay, which goes back to at least 2006.
Labour fought ferociously to prevent equal pay!
In the 10 years between 2007 and 2017, the then Labour-dominated council outrageously blocked the demands of women workers for equal pay. These trade union-funded Labour councillors squandered at least £2.5 million on legal fees and staffing costs to block the justified demand for equal pay for comparable roles.
The SNP won a big mandate in the 2017 council elections with their promise to end this grotesque injustice.
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 won payments totalling £770 million to about 19,000 workers, overwhelmingly women.
But the SNP’s latest plans trample those 2017 promises in the muck.
Inadequate compensation – and pay cuts
The three trade unions – Unison, GMB and UNITE – rightly condemn the fact it will not give enough compensation for gender-based wage discrimination to those promised a pay rise, whilst losses of up to £10,000 loom for those workers openly targeted for pay cuts.
The council is trying to sugar the pill by promising six months’ protection of pay for the thousands selected for pay cuts when their plan is implemented in April 2017; the unions reject this as totally inadequate, as it threatens a cliff-edge collapse in pay thereafter.
Even those they promise back payments to are not being adequately compensated for years of under-payment. The council want to backdate this compensation to 2023, but base the amount paid to each worker only at their entry level to the job – as opposed to their actual pay at each point along the way since then.
SNP want to rob £57 million off workers!
Whereas the council’s plans are estimated to cost £76 million in compensation for wage discrimination, the unions’ demand for backdated pay in full would – according to the SNP council leadership – cost £133 million. In other words, the council is trying to rob £57 million in compensatory back payments from workers, most of them women.
In an outrageous, dictatorial threat to workers’ rights, the council’s pay and grading report furthermore states that if collective agreement cannot be reached on these proposals they may consider “other lawful options”- including “dismissal of existing contracts and offers of re-engagement on revised terms and conditions.”
Threat of ‘fire and rehire’
Ever heard of that before? That’s the notorious method deployed by employers like British Gas and many others, endorsed by the previous Tory government, popularly known as ‘fire and rehire’.
It’s a weapon to bully workers, break the backs of the unions and impose worsened conditions.
It’s a method that Westminster’s Labour government claimed they were going to outlaw, but have not properly done, leaving loopholes which the SNP council now seem to be considering use of.
Fight for proper funding
The underlying problem is totally inadequate funding of councils by central governments, and the regressive, inadequate funding methods they deploy for local government.
Well over £500 million 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 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 inequality and pay injustice – and mount a campaign alongside the workforce to win back some of the stolen millions off the Scottish Government, to pay for it.
Axe the Council Tax – make the rich pay!
Alongside that, they should adopt the Scottish Socialist Party’s long-established alternative to the regressive, totally inadequate Council Tax and support our demand on Holyrood to urgently introduce the SSP’s income-based Scottish Service Tax.
Our most recent calculations (based on 2024 information) prove this would double this source of funding to Scotland’s 32 local authorities, from £2.7 billion in Council Tax to £5.3 billion in Scottish Service Tax – whilst charging 80% of people less!
Solidarity from the SSP
The Scottish Socialist Party supports the united call by the council unions for rejection of this disgraceful new bout of pay cuts and inequality – accompanied by the bullyboy threat of ‘fire and rehire’.
We will readily build support for any industrial and political action the workforce unions are driven into taking, in defence of equal pay 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 cuts, and taxation of the rich to transform the lives of workers and their communities.
Reject this package of pay cuts!
Pay cuts are still pay cuts, whether implemented by Labour or the SNP!
Fight for the funding to implement equal pay and proper compensation for all!
Solidarity from the SSP – defy all cuts!