Scottish Spending Review – UNISON Scotland response

Commenting on today’s Scottish Spending Review announcement, Mike Kirby, UNISON’s Scottish Secretary, said: “While we welcome the news on public sector pensions as it applies to local government, the Finance Secretary had the discretion to carry this across the public services and chose not to do so.
“Although his announcement removes the threat of industrial action in local government, we still have serious issues across the public sector with many thousands of our members still facing unprecedented attacks to their pensions.
“We’re angry at the continuation of the pay freeze which will affect hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers, who have already faced a real-term pay cut for the past two years. There’s also no evidence that the £250 payment for workers earning under £21,000 will be universally applied.”

UNISON Scotland’s Policy Briefing #13 on today’s Spending Review is published on our briefings page – www.unison-scotland.org.uk/briefings.

UNISON Glasgow Staff Newsletter

Introduction

Welcome to the new Unison Enable Glasgow newsletter.  This year has been and continues to be a busy one.  With the prolonged introduction of personalisation in Glasgow and an ongoing pay claim.  However, we’ve seen a steady rise in membership over the year and now have two new Stewards in Glasgow (contact details above).

On Wednesday 5th October at 4pm, there will be a meeting for all Enable workers in UNISON at UNISON House, 14 West Campbell Street Glasgow G2 6RX.  This is your chance to meet the new stewards and raise any issues or concerns you have to them.  If you are unable to make the meeting on the 5^th of October, and there is anything you want raised please inform one of your stewards, so that this can be heard at the meeting.

Personalisation

Unison’s position continues to be in favour of giving service users greater control of their support but against all the cuts that we believe personalisation has been used to implement.  Back in April we had successful lobby in Glasgow with over 400 people attending including many form Enable.  Since then Glasgow City Council has been slowing down its implementation of personalisation, but cuts are still taking place.  

The cuts from personalisation continue to have a massive effect on the lives people of the people that our member’s support, with many seeing drastic cuts in the level of support they receive. Others are still waiting on the Risk Enablement Panels that are meeting in mid-October to find out what personalisation will mean to their support.

UNISON is continuing to raise awareness and campaign against the severity of these cuts and the effects they are having on the lives of people we support, through engagement with service users, families and support workers.  There will be a meeting to continue this process on Tuesday 20^th September 10am till 12pm at the Glasgow City of Glasgow Branch UNISON, 4^th floor, 18 Albion St, Glasgow, G1 1LH.  This meeting will be open to all service users, workers and family members.  We urge everyone who can make it to come along.

Training for Support Assistants 

UNISON has highlighted to Enable Scotland that training had not been taking place in Glasgow for some time.  Leaving many new staff members without all their mandatory training and many long term staff members with training that is out of date.  Enable agreed that they recognise this is a problem and have said they would soon be starting up training in Glasgow again. 

Nevertheless, we are still waiting for Enable Scotland to follow through on its promises and re-implement its training in Glasgow.  Training is vital in terms of health and safety at work, staff development and progression and also ensuring that we can deliver the highest level of care possible to those we support.   

Pay claim Update

For over 3 years now we have had a pay freeze at Enable and after the consultation ballot, in which members voted heavily in favour of industrial action over pay, there is still no sign of an offer coming from Enable for a consolidated rise for 2010/11 or 2011/12 for the 2.5% pay increase we have been asking for.  At UNISON’s request Enable have agreed to consider making a one off payment to all staff including those on sessional contracts and we await their response and will consider our next steps in light of this.  They have also stated that they are still committed to achieving the Scottish Living Wage, which would see a minimum rate of pay of £7.20 at Enable and discussion will continue other making steps towards this.

Our recent research has also shown that many workers in Enable who do sleepovers with a 16 hour shift and are on the £6.87 rate are in fact earning on average £5.74 an hour, which is less than the National Minimum Wage (NMW) £5.93.  Those workers who are on the £7.20 hourly rate and do sleepovers with a 16 hour shift, currently get an average of £5.96, just above NMW.  However the NMW is due to increase on the 1^st of October to £6.08, meaning they too will be getting an average rate of pay that is below the NMW.  This is illustrated on the graphs opposite, if you believe your average weekly pay falls below the NMW when sleepovers are taken into account then please contact your stewards and we will look to taking cases forward.