Hours cut in Knowsley
Council Workers Enjoy The Fruits Of Victory!
OVER 1,200 local authority employees of Merseyside’s Knowsley council are
moving this month from a 37 to a 36 hour week, with no loss of pay, in the
first of a two-part move which will result in a 35-hour week across the council
workforce.
Roger Bannister, branch secretary Knowsley UNISON and member of
UNISON’s National Executive Council reports.
These workers are either former "manual" workers – such as cleaning,
catering, refuse or gardening workers. Or they are part of the former
"white-collar" workforce in posts such as residential and day care, where a
37-hour week was also in operation. The majority of these are low-paid women
workers.
In the main workers will reduce their hours for no loss of pay. Part-time
employees will have a pro-rata reduction in their hours, although in some cases
they will continue with their existing hours. But they will be paid for the
time at the new hourly rate, based on 36 hours.
For workers working beyond 36 hours, the first additional hour will be paid
at the higher hourly rate and any hours beyond that will be paid at time and a
half of this new rate.
Single Status Agreement
This arrangement is a major improvement on the national Single Status
Agreement (SSA), where working hours remain at 37. It was this Agreement and in
particular its inherent weaknesses, that gave rise to the current situation.
Opposed by Socialist Party members in UNISON and by UNISON’s left activists
in general, expressed through the then-influential Campaign for a Fighting
Democratic UNISON, the SSA replaced the old Manual and APT&C (white collar)
agreements.
The SSA was opposed because it removed many aspects of the previous two
agreements from national pay bargaining. This left them to be defended on a
branch-by-branch basis.
Although former manual workers’ working hours were reduced from 39 to 37,
the message that was picked up by many local authorities was that the SSA gave
them the opportunity to take back long-standing conditions of service and to
push down labour costs.
This was the case in Knowsley, one of New Labour’s northern "one party
states", where the SSA was used to push the line that all council workers had
to be on a 37-hour week. For over 1,500 former white-collar workers this would
mean an increase of two hours.
UNISON negotiated with the council for over two years, pointing out that one
paragraph of the SSA actually protected pre-agreement conditions. But the
council were intransigent and eventually went over the head of the union,
offering a series of "packages" of minimal increases in annual leave to staff
who would volunteer for a 37-hour week.
Council spin-doctors organised a road show to encourage workers to move to
37 hours. They clearly wanted to shift the balance of 37-hour working, prior to
launching a full-scale attack on the remaining 35-hour workers.
This move was disastrous for the council. UNISON ensured that stewards
attended each meeting to put the union’s position, countering managements’
misinformation. As the word got around that the council was trying to persuade
workers to agree to work two additional hours for no more pay, they refused to
attend and some meetings were abandoned.
Attack on 35-hour week
Faced with this failure, the council served notice on the 35-hour agreement
with effect from 1 February 2001. From that time all new appointments would be
on the basis of 37 hours and internal promotions would be only possible if
35-hour workers moved to 37 hours.
This would leave 35-hour workers as a beleaguered and diminishing minority.
Ballot
UNISON decided to ballot all 35-hour members apart from school employees,
over 1,500 in all. Approaches were made to GMB and TGWU to ballot all 37-hour
workers later to demand a 35-hour week for all.
UNISON’s Annual General Meeting was brought forward a month as part of the
campaign for a ‘yes’ vote and over 600 members attended! Management then
launched a vicious propaganda war to get a ‘no’ vote, starting with a letter to
the home addresses of all affected workers. This caused great annoyance by
arriving over Christmas!
UNISON responded with a series of special branch bulletins, each one
countering the lie of the day, produced on different coloured paper so that
they would be distinguished from previous issues. In the event 85% voted to
strike!
Strike
UNISON thought the council might realise the strength of feeling and offered
to hold off the strike if the employer held off the introduction of the 37-hour
week, in order to negotiate a settlement. But the council refused and the first
day’s strike was called for 1 February 2001.
It was amazingly solid, with council building workers and many manual
workers refusing to cross picket lines.
In one incident refuse workers went over the picket lines to their canteen,
where there is a tradition of discussing union-related matters before work. As
the chief officer was about to enter the building the door flew open and the
refuse workers marched out, straight into him, having voted to stop work for
the day!
Six days of strikes were called over the next few weeks, with no sign of
weakening of the members’ resolve. The mood of the pickets was high, organising
line dancing in the main street of Kirkby, going to Liverpool to lobby the
Merseyside Police Authority, when members who service it were on strike, and
keeping all the main council buildings closed on strike days.
Scabbing had disastrous consequences, such as the driver who loudly
over-revved his council van as he crossed a picket line and crashed into a
wall, or the academic from Liverpool University who refused to cross a picket
line to attend a meeting. So senior managers in the Education Department had to
relocate an important meeting to McDonalds!
A strike committee of branch officers plus each council senior steward ran
the strike. At times the strike committee meetings were tense, as sharp
tactical differences were discussed, but once a decision had been taken it was
implemented and argued through with the members.
Talks
It was clear that the council could not win the dispute and there was a
prospect of an escalation to involve existing 37-hour workers plus school-based
staff, The council sat paralysed, lacking the maturity to clamber out of the
hole they had dug.
Sensing this UNISON proposed talks in the presence of an independent
conciliator, a proposal that was unlikely to be rejected. When these talks
opened, it became obvious that the initial tactic of the council was to sit and
agree nothing, hoping that a collapse of the talks would destroy the morale of
the strikers, leading to a return to work.
UNISON was determined that this should not happen. We put forward proposals
involving compromise on both sides, so that any council walk-out would be seen
in a negative light. The council realised that the game was up. After some
serious negotiations the new Agreement was hammered out, whereby a defensive
strike to hold on to the 35-hour week became an offensive strike, as reduced
working hours are extended across the entire workforce.
All 35-hour workers keep that condition throughout their time with the
council. New appointments up to 1 April 2004 will be on 37-hour contracts,
after which all 37-hour workers drop to 36 hours, prior to the final reduction
to 35 hours in 2008.
The members’ mood after the strike has been extremely positive and
pro-union. They have learned that they do not have to take everything that the
bosses throw at them. This strike stands out as a shining example of the
effective use of union organisation and fighting leadership, in contrast to the
timidity and vacillation that characterises many national trade union leaders.