The results of a consultative ballot of 600,000 local government and school members of the Unison union recorded a massive 70% rejection of the paltry 1% pay rise recommended by the ‘independent’ pay review body last month.
According to Unison, this offer would result in 50,000 of the lowest paid government workers getting a miniscule above inflation increase while the other 550,000 would get the measly 1%.
This insulting pay-cutting offer follows local government workers being subjected to a three year pay freeze followed by below inflation pay increases in 2013 and 2014 – a 20% pay cut since the Tory-led coalition came to power.
A ballot for strike action will now be conducted over the next few weeks on the issue of pay but, significantly, the union has placed no figure on the pay rise it will be demanding. This reluctance by the Unison leadership to be clear about exactly what it is calling its members to fight for, is also very apparent over the question of health workers’ pay.
The pay review bodies that recommended a 1% pay rise for local government workers also recommended the same increase for NHS staff. This was rejected by Tory health minister, Jeremy Hunt, who decreed that NHS staff who received professional progression pay would not get even this petty increase.
The immediate response of the Unison leadership was to restrict its fire to the fact that these NHS members had been treated differently from NHS members as a whole.
In a letter to Hunt, Unison head of health, Christina McAnea, wrote: ‘In the interests of all those who use and rely on the National Health Service and of our members and their families, I am urging you to pull back from the brink and reconsider your position before the pay policy is implemented in May.’
This letter then begs Hunt to ‘step back’ from the brink by implementing the derisory 1% to all NHS workers – a declaration that Unison was prepared to accept 1%, as long as it was for all NHS staff.
In fact the Unison health conference has not agreed with this position.
At the conference, held earlier this month, delegates representing 400,000 health workers voted to start preparations for a strike ballot over the government’s ‘unfair and deliberately provocative’ pay offer.
McAnea moved the motion and had to make clear that a strike would not be just for the implementation of 1% to those who were not offered it. At the start of the conference Unison general secretary, Dave Prentis, had told delegates that the Unison national executive would back any decision made by the health conference.
The pressure of the membership for the union to take a stand on the issue of pay, and not accept a measly one per cent, is growing by the hour. The first thing that that the membership must demand is that there must be a real struggle for real wage rises after the huge fall that has taken place in living standards.
This means there must be co-ordinated all out strike action by both council, school and NHS workers, and a complete end to the practice of splitting these struggles up. Every worker is facing a common enemy, this Tory-led government, and a serious fight against it requires a united struggle.
Unison must demand a genuine wage rise for all members of at least 10%. This is a figure around which the entire working class can be mobilised in the struggle to defeat the government and smash its pay-cutting austerity measures that are designed to drive workers’ pay down to below poverty levels to starvation levels, in order to pay off the debts of the banks.
Workers must demand that the union leaders organise joint action over pay and that the TUC stops considering the feasibility of a general strike and calls one immediately for a 10% rise for all workers. Since this will mean bringing down the government, this is what must be done.
