Pay!

Well with new pay offers in both of our largest service groups (health and local government) I thought I would blog on pay, though as an industrial issue this is really for the service group execs rather than the NEC.

Within my own service group our pay offer is still way below inflation, and in England is still staged so that it is 1.9% over the year rather than the 2.5% in the rest of the UK. But it has been speckled with some little treats, such as funding towards professional registration costs (which have risen astronomically in recent years) or a tiny amount of new money for training those that aren't registered, a flat rate increase for the lowest payed, and agreement to negotiate on terms and conditions issues such as the removal of band 1 from the pay scale and moving towards a 35 hour week.

Now lets face it, this is still a crap offer - especially as staging still stands in England. But it does open some avenues which have previously been closed to our negotiators, namely addressing low pay at the bottom of the scale and the length of the working week. There has been some criticism of the Health Service Group Executive for not making a recommendation in the consultative ballot. But I can understand, on such a crucial issue, wanting to give the facts to the members and asking them their view. We will need a decisive vote to reject the deal for there to be momentum for industrial action. It is interesting to note that both the Unite - Amicus section and GMB are balloting their members recommending acceptance so it's looking more and more likely that any action our health members could take would be alone without our sisters and brothers in other unions.

I personally have not decided how I will vote in the pay ballot in health. It's clear that if we reject at this stage we would have to be able to mount successful industrial action and that will play an important part in my assessment when I make my cross in the box.

Within Local Government the issue is very live, and I don't think our lay structures have had chance to consider it and decide what to do.

The main point to drive home to members is to get your voices heard in the ballot and other consultations over the pay offer.

TUC Delegation Meeting

Thursday afternoon after the NEC meeting was the TUC Congress delegation meeting. This is where UNISON's delegates to TUC Congress come together to decide what motions we want to be submitted to Congress on behalf of UNISON.

The TUC Delegation is made up of people from across the union with spaces for NEC, regions, self organised groups, service groups and of course the young members forum. There were about 80 people there so it's a big delegation.

The key thing to be decided was which two motions we should submit to be debated at congress (which is the TUC's version of National Delegate Conference). Motions were on Affordable Housing, Public Services and Public Sector Pay. When I first looked at the motions, submitting a motion on public sector pay seemed obvious. As the debate continued it seemed much more sensible to submit pay as an emergency motion because lots of things are going to change over the coming months. We would then be able to submit a stronger and more accurate emergency motion on public sector pay. In the debate I spoke in favour of submitting the affordable housing motion, citing young members problems getting affordable social rented housing or getting onto the property ladder.

I'm glad to say that when the vote was taken we decided to submit the motions on public services and affordable housing.