Council staff vote to strike over pay

Council workers are to mount the most serious challenge to the government’s pleas for pay restraint after voting on Monday to stage a series of summer strikes.
The decision by local government workers in England and Wales to back the call for action comes less than a week after Alistair Darling, the chancellor, appealed to workers to curb demands to help combat rising inflation.
More than 600,000 members of Unison, the largest public sector union, were balloted after rejecting a 2.45 per cent pay offer. The union is demanding rises of 6 per cent or 50p an hour, whichever is greater.
Its members include care workers, housing benefit officers, teaching assistants, dinner ladies, cooks, cleaners and refuse collectors. Local government employers warned that “some of the most vulnerable people in society” would suffer if the council workers went on strike.
Unison said that members had voted by 55 per cent to 45 per cent in favour of “sustained industrial action” on a 27 per cent turn-out. Brian Baldwin, chair of the employers’ negotiating body, said this meant that only 13 per cent of the membership had voted in favour of striking.
He warned that councils would “be forced into making unpalatable choices between cutting frontline services and laying off staff” if they approved a bigger increase.
The union’s negotiating team will decide today what action to recommend to its national strike committee, which meets on Friday. The most likely outcome, say officials, is a series of short strikes starting with a two-day stoppage next month.
Dave Prentis, Unison general secretary, said: “This is a . . . clear message to the local government employers that our members are willing to fight for a decent pay rise. They are fed up and angry that they are expected to accept pay cut after pay cut, while bread and butter prices go through the roof.
“Most of them are low-paid workers, who are hit hardest by food and fuel price hikes, and they see the unfairness of boardroom bonanzas and big City bonuses.”
Civil servants and teachers have already staged a series of one and two-day strikes this year over the government’s insistence that public sector pay rises must be kept in line with its 2 per cent inflation target as measured by the consumer price index.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, sought to add to Labour’s discomfort yesterday by claiming that the cash-strapped party was reliant on union funds and would find it difficult to take a tough line against council and other public sector workers. “I certainly hope there won’t be a series of strikes. Strikes very rarely achieve their goals . . . the Government is going to have to be extremely tough about this . . . to make sure we don’t have a wave of public strikes,” Mr Cameron said at his monthly press conference.
A Downing Street spokesman said Gordon Brown, the prime minister, was “disappointed’’ Unison had decided “to take this action” but insisted the pay negotiations were “really something for local government and the trade unions”.

Article from the Financial Times website.