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SINGLE STATUS:  THE FORGOTTEN LOSERS

24-01-2008

Birmingham Council has – somewhat bizarrely - just won a government award for its Business Transformation programme, even though it won't be completed for another 10 years.  One City employee reports on how the new programme is combining with Single Status to rob him and many others of vital employment rights.
 
The plight of those who stand to lose £1000+ per year as a result of the council's pay and grading review has been much discussed, on The Stirrer and elsewhere.

But there's a group of staff members who stand to lose much more - and nobody is speaking up for them; not the unions, not the media, not their colleagues in the Council. These are the several thousand 'temporary' workers employed by the local authority through agencies.

It all comes down to the introduction of the policy of Internal Recruitment First - this has been widely touted as being the payoff for those who face pay cuts under Single Status or who are losing their jobs under Business Transformation, and has been openly described as such in staff briefing sessions.

It is the 'employee bargain' which the Council is making with its staff, by extending the principle of the redeployment register to cover all employees, giving them first dibs on any vacancies which come up – effectively, it guarantees them a job for life in return for flexibility.
 
Unfortunately, this policy does not extend to the council staff who are employed through an agency - no matter how long they have been working for the council.  Not even those like myself who’ve been doing the same job in the same team sitting in the same chair at the same computer for more than two years.

If and when our posts are eventually advertised, we are not allowed to apply for them until the rest of the council has had a chance to - and heavy pressure is put on managers to appoint from the internal pool even if the people in the internal pool are less qualified to do the job than the incumbent.

In the meanwhile, the person who has been doing the job for several years is discriminated against as a result of the council policy that if a job is left open for longer than a few months, temporary staff should be converted to fixed term contracts until the job is made permanent!
 
'Temporary' staff are already third-class council employees, since they are usually paid less than their permanent counterparts, only receive eight days annual leave on top of the bank holidays and council extra days, and don't receive sick pay.

As a result, one council worker has been ill at work spreading their germs around for the last three weeks; had they been able to afford to take two days off sick they would have recovered two weeks ago - God help them and their colleagues had they contracted NovoVirus.

Temps can’t benefit from council training schemes, either, and aren't entitled to council perks such as the reduced price annual travelcard.
 
Is it fair to discriminate against them and downgrade them even further to fourth-class employees by preventing them applying for their own jobs?

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