Spanish bin men in Madrid went on strike earlier this year when faced by a 48% pay cut & won, with a great deal of public support - will any of you be striking on july 10th?
In my case I will not be striking. On a family friendly board such as this I can't type what I think of Unison, but to summarise:
The council I work for (Ashfield District Council) carried out a thing called Single Status Job Evaluation. They looked at everyones job and awarded them points depending on your responsibilities and then used the points to calculate your new wage. Regardless of the outcome they were going to take all those on minimum wage (like me) and move them onto the Living Wage.
They assesed me and my collegues in our department and awarded us a new wage that had increased by over a third. Because it had taken time to assess everyones job, they agreed to give us a lump sum payment that covered the wage increase from when they started the process as well as the increased hourly wage.
All low paid workers were to be moved onto the living wage regardless.
They then needed the two unions, GMB and Unison, to agree to it and if they did it could be implemented straight away in April/May. GMB took a poll of its members straight away and they all agreed to it. Unison ignored it.
And ignored it.
And ignored it.
Because of this delay it becomes more complicated for the council to implement it. So with each month that passes the implemention of the Single Status Job Evalution gets further away. The last we heard was that if Unison took a poll of its members last month then we might start getting paid more at the end of the year. They've not done it yet and if it goes on much longer the whole process will have to be scrapped.
Then suddenly we find out they've organised a strike for low paid council workers in July. I'm guessing they will wait until the strike has ended before agreeing to the Single Status, so it looks like they've forced the council into paying its workers more. When in fact all it's done is hugely delay and jeapordise a fair deal for low paid council workers that the council want to implement.
It sounds a bit conspiracy theory-ish but when I posted a review on the main Unison facebook page via the review function I found people from several other councils from across the UK with a similar issue. Then the review function and reviews were deleted from the main Unison facebook page so make of that what you will.
So no I won't be striking because in this instance the council want to help us and Unison want to use us as its political pawns.
That's without mentioning how Unison completely failed to combat the privatisation of the probation service.........