By Richie Venton, SSP National Trade Union Organiser
Update on the Glasgow City Council Fire-And-Rehire Scandal
Thousands of Glasgow city council workers will have breathed at least a temporary sigh of relief this weekend (3/4 October), after the SNP-led council have been obliged to ‘pause’ their threat of mass dismissal letters – again!
Late Wednesday night (30 September), the new SNP council leader, Ricky Bell, used social media to declare that the previous Friday’s ‘pause’ on using the nailed club of fire-and-rehire had ended – openly targeting UNISON members in particular with this vicious threat.
He declared:
“We had paused the issue of letters to our staff to allow space for further discussion. Although UNISON’s actions bring that pause to an end, we are working with UNITE and GMB to ensure that their members are not dismissed and re-engaged.”
Monstrous SNP scaremongering
This is not just the thuggish method of a bully, but a blatant threat of mass victimisation for union membership and activity. How could the council identify members of each different union to include or exclude them from dismissal notices? How could the SNP council deny that this would be barefaced collective punishment of thousands of workers for daring to join the biggest council trade union, UNISON? Not to mention the overwhelming likelihood that it would be illegal, even in a judicial system heavily skewed against workers.
It was monstrous scaremongering, and a crude attempt to split the unions and their members apart, scapegoating the union with the biggest membership for also being the more steadfast in their refusal to abandon thousands of workers either facing known pay cuts or not knowing what their fate will be, as their jobs have not even been evaluated yet, with regards to Pay and Grading.
Eternal shame on the SNP council leadership for even daring to go down this road.
Stinking Labour hypocrisy
Let us summarise the sequence of events, to supplement our earlier articles and the podcast interview I did with The National (on Monday 28 September).
In 2006, the ruling Labour council imposed horrendous wage discrimination on thousands of women workers, paying them up to £3-an-hour less than men in jobs of equal value. The Labour councillors fought like fury to block equal pay, splashing out
over £2.5m in court actions to sustain pay discrimination. That shouldn’t be forgotten as Michael Marra and his band trot out their claims to be on the side of these besieged council workers. Shame on Labour’s rank hypocrisy!
The SNP won a massive vote in the 2017 council elections by promising equal pay. Nearly 18 months later, in October 2018 – after 21 fruitless meetings between the unions and the new SNP administration – 8,000 women took collective strike action, winning £770m in partial compensation for years of discrimination. Strikes work!
SNP and Greens all vote for fire-and-rehire
After prolonged negotiations in the years since, the City Administration Committee (CAC) met on 20 August to vote through their new Pay and Grading package.
Every SNP and every Scottish Green Party councillor voted for these proposals, which include outright pay cuts for 11% of the workforce, about 2,500 workers; total exclusion of over 5,000 others whose job evaluation hasn’t even occurred; and agreement to potentially use the Tory fire-and rehire weapon if collective agreement with the unions could not be reached.
Come Thursday 24 September, at 20 minutes to 4 – minutes before workers headed off for Glasgow’s September Weekend bank holiday – the council’s chief executive carried out the instructions of the SNP and Scottish Green councillors, issuing an email to over 23,000 workers declaring they would get a dismissal letter days later, with the offer of re-engagement on new contracts on 1st January – or be deemed to have resigned!
All because UNISON – by far the biggest of the three unions – had refused to cave in to the council’s bully-boy tactics and accept a shoddy deal that would slash the pay of cleaners, homecare staff, school support workers, janitors, clerical, admin workers, and others.
A tactical retreat on mass dismissals
Within 24 hours, on 25 September, the fury that erupted across the city forced the hand of the SNP national leadership, after 5 weeks of them not uttering a syllable of concern or criticism at their Glasgow councillors’ dictatorial mass dismissals plan (in cahoots with their Scottish Green allies and partners in this crime against workers).
Deputy First Minister, Jenny Gilruth, met with the unions and council leadership and the latter backed down, declaring the letters to workers’ homes were put on ‘pause’. Not removed, scrapped, permanently abandoned – just ‘paused’!
So while talks resumed this past week, the council leadership put the nailed club of fire-and-rehire on the negotiating table, placing it to the side.
Resistance wins concessions – but not enough
The steadfastness of the UNISON branch especially – backed up by the anger of workers in all unions at this atrocity by the ruling SNP/Green alliance – has won further concessions for the workforce.
At first the councillors had only offered 6 months’ pay protection for the thousands of workers facing pay cuts, which they rapidly increased to 12 months at the CAC on 20 August; this week they have extended that to 2 years, meaning the cliff-edge fall in wages by up to £11,500 would not kick in until April 2029.
That concession – the product of workers’ resistance and broader working-class anger in the city at the councillors’ actions – was accompanied by concession of another £110m towards compensatory backpay for years of wage discrimination.
However, the package on offer is still profoundly flawed, with thousands (particularly women) facing cuts to pay and allowances, and further thousands not knowing where they stand, as the process of job evaluation has not been completed. The UNISON branch rightly refused to leave thousands of workers behind – about 20% of the workforce – and demanded further investment before putting the offer to a members’ ballot.
SNP’s ‘Bazooka Bell’ tries to bully workers into submission
That’s when, late on 30 September, the SNP’s Ricky Bell seized the bazooka of fire-and-rehire, waving it over the heads of thousands of workers to try and browbeat them into submission, naming UNISON in particular, whilst claiming he would meet with the GMB and UNITE next day to find ways to avoid their members being landed with dismissal letters. Such naked, shameless divide-and-conquer tactics!
Scottish Greens win the prize for hypocrisy!
In a pathetic attempt to cover their naked arses, the Scottish Greens tried (in vain) to propose a ban on the use of fire-and-rehire at the City Administration Committee (CAC) on Thursday 1 October. A bit late!!
They had helped fashion use of that machine-gun being put to the heads of 23,000 workers when they unanimously voted for it at the CAC meeting on 20 August – and again when they helped the SNP authorise it being triggered on 24 September, then remaining as silent as Trappist monks for 5 days after that vicious email was issued, to workers driven up the wall with panic, stress and anxiety.
The Scottish Green councillors’ ultra-belated move against the weapon they previously endorsed was born of sheer, self-interested opportunism, in dread of electoral oblivion in next year’s council elections. They were acting like a man who takes off the handbrake on a juggernaut at the top of a steep hill, gives it a good shove towards a crowd of people at the bottom, and then after a while starts trotting after it crying: “Please stop! You might hurt someone!”
The new ‘pause’ on mass dismissals
Embarrassed by the prospect of a full-frontal showdown, with the growing likelihood of members of all unions taking action against mass dismissals, the SNP government’s Jenny Gilruth helped to broker a new ‘pause’ on Bazooka Bell’s fire-and-rehire letters going out over this weekend (3/4 October), with ongoing talks now being held.
Events twist and turn at lightning speed in this battle. But what is constant is the underfunding of the council, and the attempts by both the SNP and Greens to implement equal pay on the cheap, with the inevitable consequences of robbing thousands of workers to pay others what they’ve always deserved. An attempt to make workers (and communities) pay a terrible price in cuts to jobs and public services for a crisis not of their making.
Level up, not down: fight for the funds!
For decades the SSP has argued for equal pay by levelling up, not by levelling down; full compensation for past discrimination, and equal pay without a penny cut from the wage of a single worker, or cuts to any services.
That requires funding – by winning back some of the £500m stolen off Glasgow in funds from the Scottish government in recent years, and by replacing the regressive Council Tax with the SSP’s progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax – which we’ve recently calculated would have raised an extra £3 billion, in the one year of 2023/4 alone, by taxing the richest 5% of the population far, far more.
There must be no success for the council’s shameful divide-and-conquer strategy. Members of UNITE and GMB need to make sure their unions form a united front with UNISON. Demand outright, permanent removal of the threat of fire-and-rehire; unite and fight for the funds to win more for the entire workforce; for full compensation, equal pay without a single worker losing money, and mass struggles for a new deal for local authorities based on taxing the rich, instead of robbing Peter and Petra to pay Pauline.
*Meanwhile, a Freedom of Information request has confirmed that 23 senior bosses in the council have had promotions and regradings since 2023 which take each of them to salaries exceeding £100,000-a-year. Furthermore, some senior bosses are enjoying another pay hike of £26,000 in the current Pay and Grading package!*