True Grit
After eight weeks of struggle -Day Care workers return to work
After an incredible two months of unity, defiance and outstanding courage,
striking Day Care workers in Glasgow have voted to accept a deal.
Strikers have voted by the narrowest of margins
- 80 to 71 - to accept the deal negotiated and return to work.
They walked out after Glasgow City Council downgraded them to lower role profiles
- refusing to recognise the difficult work they do in day centres caring for
people with learning difficulties, including severe disabilities, and the wide-ranging
qualifications they have gained.
The regrading added up to pay cuts for many of the workers, some facing as
much as £6000 being slashed from their salary.
After the passion of the two months long strike, there was heated debate at
the meeting, and as yet some detail of the deal still has to be clarified.
Those who voted against felt the deal was unacceptable because it gives no
guarantees for support workers - who made up a quarter of the strikers.
They also object to the fact that what has been conceded on role profiles
is tied to the acceptance of the proposed ‘redesign’ of the service.
However, the council has undoubtedly been forced into major concessions on
role profiles, compared to their utter intransigence before the strike.
Then, and all through the strike, the council insisted wages would only be
protected until April 2009.
After that, there would be no guarantees.
Under this deal, every manager, depute manager and day service worker will
be lifted up to the higher role profile demanded. This will take effect from
April 2008.
But in a measure to force through service redesign, the council also agreed
that this
will be implemented by 31 January - if redesign is agreed by then.
One of the strikers who voted to accept the deal told the Voice that he was,
at first, opposed. But he made the point that the strike was all about role
profiles, and when negotiators clarified that, not only had the council conceded
the role profiles demanded, but also that workers will be assimilated to a
point in the profile that
takes them out of detriment - in other words, that they will not lose money
- he voted to accept.
In contrast, another striker said: “We’ve won nothing, it’s
really disappointing. The first thing in the agreement is that we fully accept
the service redesign - what does that mean for the future?”
Clearly, redundancies will feature in the council’s plan.
In fact, they offered arrangements for enhanced redundancy packages as part
of the deal – bringing implementation of the new role profiles forward
to January means that any workers volunteering for redundancy will have their
package worked out on the higher wage scale.
The offer, and the fact that negotiators at the top table recommended acceptance,
both played a part in gaining the narrow majority vote for acceptance.
One other main persuading factor is that the same negotiators have promised
that the issue of support workers’ profiles - at the moment guaranteed
nothing - will be addressed in the forthcoming negotiations.
These support workers are understandably angry at being excluded from a deal
that has gained higher role profiles for day service workers, but at the
expense of accepting the council’s redesign plans.
Many day service workers voted against the deal on the principle that support
workers had struck alongside them and deserved recognition with higher role
profiles. They wanted to remain united.
Some details have yet to be clarified, and it should be made clear that the
union has never said they are against service redesign.
Until the deal, the council had always insisted they would not enhance role
profiles until they’d implemented redundancies, closures and their
so-called redesign.
But the power of the strike has forced much earlier implementation. Now the
struggle to resist the scale of cuts to the service planned by the council
gets underway.
That struggle is strengthened by the strike action that’s been taken,
as it’s only through the tenacious strikers taking their campaign out
onto the streets and to other workplaces that many people have even heard
of the issues that will be thrown up by the redesign.
These 260 strikers go back to work, each one with their head high, after
an outstanding eight weeks of the ultimate demonstration of strength in workers’ unity.
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