Breaking News

MORE STRIKES PLANNED OVER BRUM SINGLE STATUS

19-03-2008

Union leaders are planning more strikes next month over Birmingham Council’s Single Status pay offer following the rejection of a compromise deal at a series of public meetings last week.

Steve Foster, chair of the joint trade union negotiating committee, confirmed this morning: “We are looking at a couple of dates in April.

“The Council aren’t happy with us, and some people are saying that they thought we’d already agreed a deal with them, but that’s not true.

“There was a proposal but we weren’t recommending it or disapproving it. We put it to members with a straight bat, and they told us what they thought.”

Unions won’t have to carry out a further ballot to call more strike days because they are still within the legal timeframe, but Foster says he hopes the action can still be averted.

During the previous strike in February, schools and leisure centres were closed and rubbish went uncollected on the streets. A second walkout was called off, pending two weeks of intensive negotiations, but it now looks as though these have ended in failure.

“Ultimately we’re hoping it doesn’t go to a strike,” Foster said. “What we want is a meeting without preconditions.

“The sticking points are the pay progressions [performance related pay] and the fact that new joiners could be earning less than the people they are working alongside.

“If people are doing the same job as someone next to them, it can’t be fair and equal for them to be earning thousands less.”

Foster scoffed at suggestions by Councillor Alan Rudge that the recent public meetings supporting further public action had been infiltrated by the Socialist Workers Party (see link here)

“The Socialist Workers were there as they always are” he said.

“But the only speaker I heard was blaming the Labour government not the Council.”

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