Pay Matters - Fighting for decent pay for public sector workers

There must be no doubt that Pay will be the big issue for the union in 2008, and will be the focus of much of our work. Yesterday I attended the Campaigns and Recruitment Working Group where we fed into plans for the pay campaign, which looks really exciting. We made it clear that we must use every opportunity to talk about our pay as it is linked to pretty much everything, whether it’s fuel prices or affordable housing or pensions or the quality of public services. The campaign website is now online at www.unison.org.uk/paymatters which I would recommend visiting.

We must not sit back while the Government attempt to limit our pay to 2%, a real terms cut in our standard of living as rents go up, fuel goes up, council tax goes up by higher amounts. The Government point to the CPI (Consumer Prices Index) as their preferred measure of inflation (well they would) because this doesn’t include things like house prices and fuel costs, but these are costs that our members still face. UNISON argues that the RPI (Retail Price Index) is what we need to use which is currently around double the CPI. Now the Government are happy to use the RPI to link student loans to, which means that the interest of my student loan last year was at a rate double my 1.9% I got as a health worker.

Many of our workers are low paid, and they are mainly women workers. If the Government is serious about it’s child poverty agenda then cutting the real terms pay of these women is not the way to do it.